Ineluctable
by FigureofDismay
Summary: An alternate history; what if Buffy had made different choices after that lost summer in LA? What if Giles had actually found her? What if they had actually talked? Some responsibilities cannot be cast off. But neither can some human frailties and natural hopes. All you can do is try to find the balance. An S3&S4 canon divergent AU. [Buffy/Giles slowburn fic] [No underage content]
1. LA: Summer

**Summary:**

An alternate history; what if Buffy had made different choices over that lost summer or after she came back from LA? What if Giles had actually found her? What if they had actually talked?

Some responsibilities cannot be cast off. But neither can some human frailties and natural hopes. All you can do is try to find the balance.

 **Notes:**

I have shipped these two characters at least 15 years now, but this is my first try at writing Buffy, Giles or any of the gang. I'm not sure if my voice suits them, but I'm so enjoying telling their story at long last. I hope it works for you as well.

The Chapter count is an estimate. I have more written, I have an outline, I have a lot of clear images for this fic, but due to my health, sometimes updates may be delayed. Please bear with me. You can always come talk BG shipping or bug me about updates over on my tumblr: althoughsolemn. Tumblr. com ;)

* * *

 **ineluctable (adj.):**

 _"not to be escaped by struggling."_

1620s, from French _inéluctable_ (15c.) or directly from Latin _ineluctabilis_ ; "unavoidable, inevitable," from in- "not, opposite of" + _eluctabilis_ "that may be escaped from." From _eluctari_ "to struggle out of," from _ex_ "out, out of" + _luctari_ "to struggle."

* * *

Buffy had left Sunnydale in the middle of May, missing even the opportunity to fight to participate in the last weeks of the school year thereby doing ruin to her grades and leaving her school transcript what looked to be permanently unfinished, an undignified ellipsis to nothing. Despite the gripping malaise she'd found herself in, she had been sickly aware of the time passing during finals week, the awkwardly slow creep of school hours when she knew Willow, Xander and Cordelia must have been sitting their exams while she lay in her motel bed and pretended that she dozed. It startled her that she cared that much about her academic standing, but the shame of it had been enough to make a dent in her feeling of exhausted remove. She was informally expelled, likely she couldn't have taken her finals and tried to rescue her grades even if she'd still been there, but bald fact of her failure was yet another blow.

It wasn't long before her wad of ready cash was dangerously small, so necessity drove her out of her stupor. She looked for work while her friends back in Sunnydale would have been passing around their yearbooks. She was inexperienced and she didn't have a resume and she was under 18, but she was good at lying, good at looking pretty, petite, and agreeable. She didn't have the money and she didn't have the energy to stand on her pride. The job at the diner paid under the table if she needed it, and wasn't factory work or cleaning floors so she took it and counted herself lucky.

The manager was nice, sympathetic. His name was Mike, an energetic fair haired guy of broad build and middling height, probably around Giles's age. He was jovial, and despite his apparent strength and buzzed haircut he had an unimposing presence, an extravert but not a pushy one. He had a pretty, dark haired wife and two young kids who came by the diner sometimes, obviously his life was busy enough without prying into the lives of his waitresses. He'd looked genuinely concerned when Buffy had given him a reason for why she hoped he could pay in cash.

"I was in a relationship," she had said, looking at the formica table top in the corner booth, "I thought it was like an epic love story. But he changed. Things got… very bad. Right now I don't have access to my bank account. It's better if people can't find me."

"I understand," Mike had said, "I've heard that story way too many times. I can accommodate you for now. Let me know if he shows up, the boys and I have chased off persistent exes before so don't worry. You'll be okay here."

There was guilt at the lie, sick remorse at sullying the memory of Angel's returned and damned soul, but Buffy was also surprised at how much it felt like telling the truth. If you took away the demons and the threat of a hell dimension, her story was that of a battered wife. That was another dragging tide of shame, she kept having to steady herself against it when she forgot to keep her head down and her thoughts bound to only the most immediate and trivial. She didn't have to fake her grim look to tell her tale. She told Mike that she was 21, that before she had to move she'd been an assistant for a history professor, but that she was strong, and good at dealing with strangers. Mike didn't show any signs that he disbelieved her. He gave her a shift the next day and told her that payday was on Fridays and he didn't give advances, but that there was a staff discount for meals at the diner, and free day-olds of the quick turnover bakery goods.

Waiting tables was easy, in a way. She was tough, she didn't tire easily, her feet didn't get sore and her ankles didn't swell like some of the other waitresses complained about. If she happened to scald herself on a hot plate or overheated coffee, she was fine again in a matter of hours. Her balance was perfect and her memory was certainly adequate for conveying orders to the cook.

In other ways it was awful, draining, not as bad as staying in Sunnydale would have been but certainly taxing enough to feel the strain. All the forced smiling and friendly hellos, all the brushing off interest from the men she waited on who wanted more than their coffee and pie from her. Some of them were leering, some of them were interested and concerned, looking to save the pretty blonde waif in an old fashioned uniform from the life of drudgery that was not invisibly wearing her down. The worry of strangers was tiresome, but easy to cast off, as it was cloying and shallow and born of a glancing first impression of the figure she presented. It was just another kind of come on, really, and she already knew well how to let it pass by without much offense on either side. It was like playing a part, a constant effort, but at least it was a flatter, less dynamic and demanding part than the one she had played at Sunnydale High.

After work was harder. Buffy had a choice between trying to amuse herself at the apartment, or going out to patrol. She did patrol, though she had sworn to herself that she would not as she had made half-coherent plans on that long bus ride south. She only lasted a week before she bowed to the guilt, and the non-deferrable pull of the restless and ashy night. The habit and the bone-deep restlessness would not be put aside no matter how vacant, or muted with exhaustion she felt. But she did try to pace herself. She didn't know the territory and she had no backup in case of nasty surprises. She didn't go out every night or even every two or three. It felt like she was dangerously tired, and anyway she had saved the world, and at enormous cost, so it only seemed right to take some time for herself.

Time to herself was something of which buffy was getting plenty. The diner had been looking for help because a waitress had left with no notice, but Buffy was the newest hire and the lowest priority in getting shifts. She was making her rent and just about getting by for food and some thrift store clothes to fill out the necessities shed forgotten to stuff in her bag. Probably that was because she didn't have much interest in food or clothes since she'd come back to LA, or longer if she thought back clearly, since Angel had turned. But there was no spare cash for nights out, or better restaurants, or for regular trips to trendy coffee shops for four dollar mochas and the cozy atmosphere. Not yet anyway. Maybe later, when she got more hours or found a better job, and got some savings.

Buffy found though that her mind shied from long term plans. It was impossible to see. Maybe she didn't really believe that she had left Sunnydale for good. Going back was equally impossible to picture, so she doubted it. Maybe she didn't believe that she would live that long. Girls like like her, the chosen few with their stakes and swords, they lived short lives. Giles had refused to give an average, but he'd let her look through the journals. In 7 months she would be 18, the age when so many of the dead girls in the records met their ends.

It didn't seem to alarm her anymore, that fated end. It still sent a faint cold shiver of the bleak unknown through her when she thought about it, but Buffy had also accepted that she looked at the inevitable with a breath of relief, almost like relying on a promise. She could endure this life because it wasn't going to go on forever, not decades, not even years maybe, but a string of months that stretched only just out of sight. Not an interminable duty after all, just a brief passage to be endured. Funny how that same awareness of brevity used to grieve her, leave her feeling confined in a grim, exitless enclosure while her friends viewed vistas ahead of them. Now that spectral future loomed brutal and implacable and even closer than it ever had been, but she could look at it now, from time to time, and feel nothing much at all.

That same nothingness of feeling, a quiet nervelessness that didn't allow any sense of reality beyond immediate minutia had seemingly surrounded her entirely. There were so many important things she ought to have been thinking about, or reacting to, or planning towards, but all of those concerns felt to Buffy as much like the summer wildfire haze that drifted over the city, constant and consequential but insubstantial and far out of reach.

What felt real were the shifts at the diner, long and not so pleasant but subdivided into small, repetitive tasks and easily managed. Or the weekly dull afternoons at the laundromat, people watching, or stalking through her new neighborhood in ever-widening loops, trying to burn off energy and learn her way around in this sullen, black and gold city where no one walked if they cannot afford to drive. Or the quiet days to herself in her haphazardly furnished studio apartment, with the snowy tv on low for the noise, buried in a paperback mystery.

There was a used bookstore in easy walking distance from her apartment, she'd stumbled on it and it had reminded her, with it's yellow light and dry book smell and dark wood floors and maze of high shelves, of the Library she had given up, so she kept going back. The romances she used to like held no comfort for her any longer, nor the dark, crowded shelves of too-false and too-close fantasy, nor did she feel equal to better class of novel that her mother always used to bring home from book club and try to pass along to her, but she had taken to the murder mysteries. They were riddles as much as stories. The long-suffering detectives, the winsome and tragic damsels, the greed-riddled villains, they were all trotted out in turn and made their dances through the plot, parading their clues, regular as clockwork, and then all was revealed and the evil-doers met their sticky ends, all's well that ends well, and even the damsels and the detectives tended to go on their separate ways, discrete and self-contained as before. They were stories that made no undue promises. There was a particular author, almost absurdly prolific, whose works took up three whole shelves at the bookstore, who wrote with a wry, steady but tepid voice (though Buffy herself had not the practice to diagnose this mediocrity of craft she nevertheless perceived). She had gravitated to the long lines of yellowy spines, subtly reminded of the library copies of Nancy Drew Mysteries she'd worked her way through as a kid, and tempted by the sheer volume of sameness. They were entertaining enough to keep her attention, but not so lively as to require more energy to consume on her part than she was able to give, comfortingly regular and lullingly grim. Buffy bought them in twos and threes, and returned them for credit when she'd finished, in order to put towards the next batch.

Buffy found that she was capably self sufficient. Though at times she felt like she was sleepwalking, or anyway shut off from her true senses and the full shape of her mind, she was pleased to find that she could feed herself, keep her new place clean, wake up at the right times, appear at her job at the right times. Buffy had often thought of herself as easily distracted and under motivated, perhaps even lazy when it came to anything besides her pet interests or situations with immediate, mortal consequences. She had wondered often over the last couple years, as it became clear that she would have to move away from her mother's house if she ever wanted to stop lying and sneaking around to fulfill her responsibilities, if she would really be able to look after herself and her living space, as chores always seemed to fall to even lower priority than homework and sleep.

And yes, she missed clean, folded clothes showing up on the end of her bed, and someone else preparing food she didn't have to pay for, but that was all. But it turned out she kept up fine, she even liked householding. She liked having her own space and her own things, cheap and few as they were - and all the more reason to keep them nicely. She'd found a new appreciation for the mundane, for routine. It wasn't as though there were many other demands on her energy. The diner shifts didn't generate homework. There were no demonic crises to research. There was just herself, alone, sequestered in her tiny apartment, and if she lived and worked neatly and quietly, patrolled unobtrusively and paid her due tithes against the dark, maybe she could fool the universe into letting her keep her small life as if she'd earned it.

June passed in this way, and July, and a hard-baked and smoky august settled in, with copper sunlight in the mornings and dusty pavements bleeding heat in the was air conditioning at the diner but there was none in her apartment. Buffy splurged on a new large standing fan, wrestling the box home on the bus and dooming herself to day-olds until next payday, because the brick apartment building had become unbearable, taking in the day's heat and holding it. She kept the curtains closed and the fan blowing at all hours of the day.

Marlena and Zosia, the two waitresses that weren't that much older than she, had realized that Buffy wasn't just passing through. They tried to make overtures of friendship, coffee breaks taken together, invitations out for drinks and a little dancing. Marlena was outgoing and vibrant, with a sweet round face and thick dark hair and a cajoling manner. Marlena wanted to be an actress, wanted to fall into a great big fairytale love. Zosia was taller and paler, with an oval european face to match her Polish name. Zosia was much more reserved but she had a deadly dry sense of humour. Zosia was putting herself very slowly through community college, though she had no specific ambitions for her degree. They obviously spent a lot of their free time together, they spoke in the patter of shared experiences, though she suspected that Zosia and Marlena had the friendship of shared circumstance rather than shared interests. In another life Buffy could easily see becoming fast friends with Marlena and Zosia.

Buffy was happy enough to chat with them at work, to have a little light conversation. She didn't take up any of their invitations though, or issue any of her own. She liked both of them. She didn't want to lie to them. She didn't want to put them at risk by letting them into the periphery of her life. Being a Slayer on the run was a little like being in witness protection, she supposed, keep yourself to yourself, don't get to know people, don't attract any attention, and no one around you will get hurt.

She wasn't lonely, not really. She wondered how Willow was recovering, and Giles, of course, Giles who probably had suffered the most of all, though he had been - miraculously - on his feet and well dressed the last glimpse she had of him. She wondered what Oz thought of all of it, the canny outsider in their midst. She wondered how they'd all done on their finals, if Xander and Cordy could really still be together in the face of every improbability. She wondered, in a stiff, oblique and hesitant fashion, if her mother missed her and regretted throwing her out. Buffy didn't long for their company, though. Didn't find herself reaching for the phone and wishing she could chat or share some piece of news. Buffy was aware that her leaving must have hurt all of them, but there was only more of that submersing stillness between herself and her friendships, or even anything as coherent as remorse.

She didn't grieve, either. Not the way Buffy pictured grieving, not with fits tears and sorrowing. Not the way she had after her birthday, just after Angel had turned. She felt guilt, yes, and something harder and more immovable and iron-cold that didn't have a name. But the ecstasies of grieving that girls in stories who had lost their loves were shown to have, that never came. Maybe too much had already happened since she'd lost Angel the first time, too much innocence lost. Or maybe that skill she'd learned when she was Called, even before that when her parents started fighting all the time, of tucking life's hurts quietly within where no one else could see them (save for rare, shaming outpourings) worked too well now, hid them so deeply that even Buffy herself couldn't reach them and take them in her hands anymore.

Or else that catharsis of girls in love stories was made up as well. Fake, fake, fake like love conquers all, and the constancy of a mother's generous heart. Funny sort of world it turned out to be. The monsters were real, and magic, and Destinies and Callings, but every softening recompense and passionate enticement of fairytales turned out to be smoke and mirrors. No wonder she'd had to go away, after all that.

Warm September loomed large. Zosia and Marlena backed off from their attempts to get to know her. Mike's wife and kids, a little brown-haired boy and even smaller girl, came in one afternoon to visit him in the manager's office to show off their back to school shopping. Brightly colored backpacks and super hero lunch boxes and shiny yellow rubber boots, getting ready for kindergarten and second grade. Fall was coming, though not the tv and movie fall showered in maple leaves and rain Buffy always inwardly pictured despite her southern California upbringing.

Last chance to go back, she warned herself more than once. Last change to slot back into her Sunnydale life. Last chance to go beg for her education, to get her diploma on a schedule that might still look alright on a college application. Last chance to make amends, go be Willow and Xander's friend again, hope that Giles would be willing to put up with her some more. Buffy couldn't put it into words, but the beginning of the school year felt like the final deadline, the last test to see if she would stick to her new life.

Buffy's resolve held. Whether it was bravery or cowardice, righteousness or stupidity, she didn't know, but she stood her ground. September arrived and no disaster befell her. So this is it, then, she told herself, part reassurance part regret, this is what I'm doing with my life now. The evenings cooled enough that she bought a better coat at the second hand store, with nice deep pockets for stakes, just in chase. Life in LA looked like it would go on and on, just the same as over the summer. A month or more had passed since her dreams were full of Angel and blood and fear.

On the day of the equinox, a quiet balmy day with a wind from off the coast so the sky was clear and blue, there was a knock at the door. Buffy didn't have shift until the evening, and she was almost through with the latest mystery - guessed who'd done it but wanted to know for sure - so she was home. She wasn't dressed for the day, no point, no plans, but she put a sweatshirt on and that was presentable enough to tell whoever it was they had the wrong door.

Buffy opened the door a cautious foot, enough to look and speak and close it quick, but when she saw, she let it swing wide. Shocked but not afraid, she stood still, arms at her sides.

"Hello, Buffy," said Giles, a faint smile around his eyes.

"What are you doing here?" Buffy demanded, "How did you find me?"

"A simple casting," he said with a dismissive tilt of his head, "A locator spell. Well within even my ability."

Buffy wondered if she should be angry, or flustered and unsettled to be discovered, but she wasn't. She was something, something suffusing and large and biting that made tears rise in her eyes, but she didn't have a name for it. For a second it was like drowning. Then she found her balance, cleared her throat. Buffy crossed her arms, tight and protective.

"Come in," she said, and stepped back from the door.

Giles stepped into her apartment. She could smell for a second his cologne, soft, balsam, sweet and smoke, and vividly familiar - she hadn't realized she knew it so well until there he was and after so long. He was moving carefully. Not like he was injured still, thank god, Giles had already suffered more than enough from her disaster, but like he was uncertain of his welcome. His posture rounded and non-threatening. He watched her closely, his eyes not leaving her until the last possible second as he passed.

"You know you oughtn't do that, invite people in. Especially if you haven't- haven't seen them in months," said Giles. His voice was quiet, tight. His eyes were deferentially downcast but she could tell that there were manifold complicated, bitter things beneath that tone.

"You're not people," she said bluntly, "and I would know if something had happened to you, even if I didn't hear about it."

Giles looked up, startled. Then something in his face seemed to soften, or come to life, in recognition. He made a faint noise of assent.

"Well," said Buffy, after she had closed the door. "Here you are. Here, in my apartment. There isn't… There's not another apocalypse already, is there?"

"No, Buffy," he said, still staring.

"Okay. Good. That's something anyway. So. I guess you need some kind of explanation, then," said Buffy.

"If you would like to give one," he said softly, "But I don't require it, if you would, um, would prefer…" he trailed off, shrugged.

She was staring, too, astonished. Giles, here in real, waking life, healthy and intent and she didn't know what. She still didn't recognize the expression he was making, but she was sure it didn't mean he was angry - at least not on top where she could see it. Shell shocked, maybe. He seemed taller than she remembered, even with the non-threatening posture, and a more pervasive, startling presence. She always forgot, somehow, and it had been four month since she had seen her Watcher.

Big as life, she thought, So now what?


	2. LA: Tea

'Now what' turned out to be boil water in her clean, red second hand kettle on the electric stove (lefthand big burner, the righthand one didn't turn on) and make tea in two of her three mugs. All she had was Bigelow Earl Grey, which tasted lousy compared with the imported blends in tins that Giles kept in his office, but it was cheap and the smell made her think of better days, bergamot and tannins. She'd bought some the month before even though it had been too hot to think of boiling water, riding a wave of inexpressible loss.

Giles sat in the faded green channel-back chair beneath the window, his back to the pale yellow bedspread she'd strung up to screen the bed. It was the only comfortable chair, she would have to turn around the stiff wooden one at her tiny dining table in order to sit and talk with him. The armchair was the other big piece of furniture besides the bed, and she often curled up there easily, but with Giles sitting there, steady and attentive, it suddenly looked undersized. He had watched her closely, like he wasn't sure that she wasn't about to bolt. It had made her nervous and clumsy, almost dropping the cups as she took them down from the cupboard, and letting the door slam carelessly. She'd jumped at the unexpected sound and then sighed.

Stop it, she admonished herself fiercely, get ahold of yourself. it's Giles. He's not scary. But he was, in a sense. He was someone she had to face and talk to whose opinion mattered in the course of her life, and she hadn't spoken to anyone like that in four months.

By the time she brought over his mug to the arm chair's tiny side table, he was no longer watching her every move but seemed lost in thought, withdrawn within. He was dressed casually in that dark green fleece sweater of his and dark jeans, but though they were clothes she recognized, they looked looser on him than they did before. Giles looked up to find her at his elbow. He smiled, faint and sweet and real, but it faded and he looked down again.

He looked tired, she thought. Tired as after days long research sessions or weeks upon weeks of trouble after demonic trouble. It didn't startle her, she felt much the same. Angelus was gone, spring was gone and summer too, but the crisis didn't seem to be over. More like it had changed it's shape and maybe lost it's voice, but it dogged them still. Buffy also realized that Giles was uncertain as she was, with no more idea what to say her than she to him.

"Well," she said again, and retreated to the dining table in the corner with her own mug. She sat at her one dining chair. It was such a small apartment that this didn't put her very far away, still a conversational distance. "First thing, I guess is… Do Sunnydale's finest still think I killed Kendra?"

"No, no, that misguided notion didn't last for more than a day or two before they reverted back to the ever-ready explanation of gang violence. I thought you might have heard that much, at least. It did make the news, death of a foreign national, gang members breaking into a school, and so on."

"I didn't keep track of the news. Probably should have, but I wasn't really up to paying attention to… anything, for a while there."

"Ah. Of course."

"I take it your Council boys pulled strings to get me off the hook."

"You already were off the hook, Buffy, there was nothing more you could have done to prevent Kendra's death. But… yes, in fact. The Council had to make arrangements with the police for her, um, remains, and I assume they also administered a little push to be sure the right conclusion was reached."

Buffy nodded, and was willing to admit that she felt relieved. But also that a selfish part of her also felt let down, because being wanted on erroneous murder charges were a really good reason never to go back. She acknowledged too that she had known deep down, or on the higher cerebral level that she was currently ignoring, that she was never really a fugitive. Not from the law anyway. She hadn't gone that far and her alias wasn't that good, if they really thought she was guilty of Kendra's murder, she would have been found months ago. It wasn't really why she left, though, so Buffy wasn't sure if it changed anything.

"Does the Council know that I left the Sunnydale?" she asked next.

"No. I haven't given them the slightest hint. It seemed far better that they not hear anything until I understood more clearly what the road ahead might look like. If we don't end up going back, I will give them the impression that the decision happened at that time."

"You mean you aren't here to drag me back?"

"No one is dragging you anywhere. You are your own person and no one can force you to do anything and I have no intention of trying. You deserve, after everything, to make your own choices," he said. It was a surprisingly impassioned speech, with more of that barely suppressed anger and something.

"Make my own mistakes, you mean," she said, testing.

"No I do not," said Giles, terribly crisp.

Not angry at her then, she decided with a faint nod. Only now maybe he was a bit annoyed that she'd essentially accused him of sweeping in to act the stern and ungiving figure of authority over her which was something he'd never been with her - had only been slightly, a very long time ago. It was a sensitive subject, one that made Giles particularly uncomfortable. She'd guessed that his own education at the hands of the Watchers as a young man had been an unforgiving thing, but she wasn't really sure if that was what was behind it. Aside from the broad pantomime of simple student and teacher they fell into at times, it was an issue they had both carefully avoided.

"And it would be especially inappropriate if I tried to push you to return to Sunnydale if you were called here for a reason."

"Like big-C called, mystical Slayer reasons?"

"It's been known. The records show that many Slayers have felt to pull towards unknown places that later became instrumental battle grounds."

"Oh. Well, no, then. It's not like that, I'm pretty sure. I came to L.A. because of my dad, I thought he might be able to… But once I got here I knew I couldn't contact him. Then I just," she shrugged, not having a way to put to words the huge sense of inertia that had overtaken her. "I couldn't face picking up and trying somewhere else."

"You haven't had dreams?"

"Not about here," said Buffy, perhaps incautiously, though if there was anyone who deserved to know, it was him.

It seemed unkind to him to speak about those dreams though, the ones where she had helplessly watched Angelus make him bleed, and drag out Jenny Calander's ghost - somehow, she hadn't been able to see in the dreams how, but it disturbed her almost more than anything - to make him weep. Buffy knew that they were true dreams, as she always knew, but she also knew that Giles wouldn't want her to have seen. He was a private man and witnessing someone's torture was unbearably intimate, like witnessing their sex or their nakedness, and perhaps even more intimate than that. She had been thankful that she hadn't had to face Giles upon waking from these dreams when they came, and it turned out the weeks that passed since they'd stopped hadn't really lessened the sting. She looked at Giles' left hand, an uncheckeable impulse, and saw that it was whole and straight, but relaxed on his lap, and he held his mug in his right. She couldn't remember if that was his habit or not, couldn't tell if he deferred to injuries that still bothered him. Giles followed the line of her gaze and looked back at her in such a questioning way that Buffy had to look away.

"No Slayer dreams at all, actually, since some time in July," she continued, trying to step gently around the awkward moment and willing him not to ask. "Maybe mystical things have gone quiet for now."

Giles made a non-committal noise and tasted his tea. She watched him try valiantly not to make a face and therefore make a different kind of face.

She laughed slightly. "I know, it's terrible isn't it? I couldn't find the real stuff. But the caffeine works, and you can kind of pretend. Don't feel obligated if it's ick."

"It's fine, Buffy." Giles smiled with strained good humor, "It's certainly better than fourth-time-refreshed-pot research marathon swill."

"And that at least is Willow's trick not mine. I still don't understand how she's fine with handling spell gunk and helping me get rid of dead demon parts, but balks at cleaning out tea leaves." Buffy paused, startled at the easy and familiar and wildly out of place small talk. Even the out of place-ness was familiar, but she was unhappy with herself for stalling.

"Giles," she asked seriously, "How is Willow?"

"She's fine. She's a very resilient girl, she was up on her feet in only a few days," he said calmly, "They're all fine, Buffy. A trifle worried, but fine. And it has in fact been very quiet on the patrolling side of things, so we have been coping in that respect."

"And you? Are you alright?"

"I am recovered well enough," he hedged, and then sighed, sinking further into her armchair and frowning. "I'm at a loss," he admitted. "it's not at all clear to me what happens next."

"And you came to find me because you thought I might know what to do now? Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds? I mean look at me. I'm living in a 500 Square foot cubby hole that doubles as an oven in the summer, working for tips and only kind of making ends meet, and hoping nothing bad happens. I'm not exactly displaying a lot of figuring it out skills."

"But it does appear that you are coping here, and surviving better than many young people alone in a city with no safety net. You are an intensely capable young woman. You're certainly doing far better than I did, when I… When I took my own walkabout. But that isn't quite what I meant."

"Then what do you mean? Why did come here?"

"You are the Slayer," he said almost helplessly, "more than that you are my Slayer. It is my life's work to assist you and support you. But I don't know any longer what helping you requires. I don't know if going back to Sunnydale after everything these last two years would be helpful or harmful to you. You have stopped an unprecedented five apocalypses in your three year career, a rate of crisis not heard of since the mid seventeenth century. The Council seers missed you as a Potential for fifteen years, and even still you are hidden from their Sight. That means that we have know way of knowing if we will continue facing trouble on this scale at the same outrageous rate, or if it will increase, or if we've made it through the worst of it and will now return to what was, for the previous few hundred years, the status quo."

He paused and looked at her steadily as though willing her to understand something. "It also means," he told her solemnly, "that if you would truly prefer not to be... found... for a time, the Council and its Seers cannot find you."

"Are you suggesting… that I not go back?"

"No. Or yes, if that's what you- I'm suggesting that it is that it's your choice. For once. The voices of Prophecy are silent. The Hellmouth's energy is to all appearances currently at a low ebb. The matter of your education is going to take some real effort to untangle no matter what path you take. I'm suggesting that, Calling or no, you are human and if you need time to- to process things, I would much rather you have it than see you pushed to a breaking point."

"That's not the kind of thing you usually say to me. In fact that's the opposite of the fulfill your sacred duty party line."

"I haven't had to remind you of your responsibilities for a long time. I think you'll find that in fact, lately, I have been trying to persuade you that you are still just one person and not everything is your fault or your responsibility."

Technically that was true, if she sorted through her memories case by case. With the little troubles and minor demons, sometimes she would grumble and profess her disgust with Slaying, and sometimes Giles would push her back on track, or just look long-suffering and fed up. But that never happened with the big things, with those she never thought to decline, and he was often pulling her aside, asking her to slow down and think things through. When she went to stand against the Master, he tried to take her place. When the order of taraka came, he wanted her to run and hide. When the demon inside Angel shed it's pleasant skin, he'd told her to save her strength and that he didn't blame her. It still rung strange in her ear, though.

"But you've never actually told me to stop with the saving the world thing before," she said, skeptical.

"At this particular time, the world doesn't need saving. I'm not saying give it up forever, I don't think that would help you, and I don't think you would chose to. But it's never been so bad that you felt like you had to leave town before, either."

"It was hell," she confessed, probably for the first time aloud, angry and wounded and wanting him to see it and know what she'd been through. Self justification maybe but it was true, and she hadn't felt able to tell anyone before, not wanting to leave them unreassured. "It was five months of semi-public, spectacular hell with Angelus."

"I know it was. I'm not doubting you. I'm not angry. You deserve to have time to decompress. And there is time, some time anyway. Today is the autumnal equinox, we stand now at the penultimate corner of time's compass, and every sign tells me that the year will quietly dwindle away. After the Solstice, perhaps not, likely not, but at the moment, there is nothing pulling us in any particular direction, no fate, only options."

"A crossroads," she summarized.

"It seems that way."

"And you're really saying that my word goes, even if it's not 'oh yes, let's go back and babysit the hellmouth some more?' Even if maybe I don't want to go back at all."

"Yes, Buffy. It's your life, after all. Though I'm not at all sure I believe that's what you'd say."

"Well. Maybe, maybe not. The weird thing is that it's not even the hellmouth part, you know? I mean, it's partly that, but…." Buffy shrugged, mute in the face of a muddle too huge and swamping to know where it began or ended.

All of it, her mother, Snyder's vendetta, the police, Kendra dead in the Library, Jenny dead in Giles' bed. Angel beating her up in a cemetery when she was so sick with fever that she couldn't tell up from down, and still being hurt when he called her boring. Even Willow and Xander, and watchful Cordelia and Oz, the ring of concerned faces she could picture. A person's torture is a grotesquely intimate thing, and Angel had been sure to torture her in a way that made them all bear witness, so that they would remember it when they looked at her, and she would have to watch them remembering it, and the reverberations would carry on and on even though Angelus was gone and Angel was dead. It lay like a wide wet stone in her chest, and stopped up her words.

For the first time she desperately wanted to tell it all, the whole dreadful procession through hell. She wanted to tell Giles specifically, because he was there, looking at her with steady, solemn sympathy, and he could hear it and understand. But it was too big and she was too used to not saying anything. The silence hung, a listening silence. She could feel Giles' curious, patient waiting.

"I don't know," Buffy said, quiet and oblique, "I don't know what to tell you. It's like I was a collision. All unstoppable forces and immovable objects. Everyone around me got caught up in the mess. The… threat… was over, but I was still… a collision. So I left because it just seemed safer for everyone. But most of the immovable, unstoppable things came with me. All this time I haven't figured out anything, really."

"Do you patrol?"

"Sometimes. More than I thought I would. LA is full of vampires, it's not like I can just ignore it."

"That's something you've figured out, then, isn't it?" he prodded gently, "You don't want to leave everything about being a Slayer behind."

"I guess," she conceded grudgingly, "At least this time I know that pretending ignorance doesn't work."

"Do you intend to stay here in LA? Do you want to?" he asked. Giles was one of those who knew very well that want, and intend were often very different things.

"I don't know. It's hard here, and slow. But it's my own little patch, you know? I know it doesn't look like much, but it's mine."

"No, it's nice, Buffy. Neat and pretty and very… you. I'm impressed," said Giles, smiling sheepishly, "How well you've done for yourself in such a short time. I… I must confess I rushed down here after I did the spell, with the idea that I was going to rescue you from the kind of fatalistic squalor that I lived in with Ethan and the others, but this is… very much the opposite of that."

"Hmm. Well, thank you. But I don't know how much of a positive you should take the tidying as. Apparently when I'm stressed and don't know what to do with myself, I nest."

He shrugged. "A far safer coping mechanism than many, you have to admit," he said with a slight salute of his mug to indicate the whole shabby-clean space.

"Giles, if you rushed down here… Why now?" asked Buffy, having wondered since she opened the door to him, wondered even before that as September had drawn in with still no sign from him. She'd been expecting him, she realized. "I mean, why wait four months if you were planning on looking for me?"

"At first I was…. Well, recovering," he said with a brief smile like a wince, and an unconscious fidget of his left hand. "And then… From the time we realized you were no longer in Sunnydale, I felt that you had left to process what had happened. I didn't want to make things worse for you by forcing the issue in some kind of miserable confrontation. It wouldn't help anything. I think you remember that I've reason to have some idea what you might be going through after such traumatic events. I knew that you could look after yourself, I trusted that you would not do anything… catastrophic. I thought if I waited, you would decide to come back on your own when you were ready. It wasn't until the school year began and none of us had heard anything that I realized that you might not be coming back, or that you might be in trouble. That I should go to you and see if you needed help, and if perhaps your Calling was taking us in a different direction."

"I'm sorry I didn't call. I couldn't," she said with wretched feeling, and shook her head dismissively at the inadequately trite phrases. "Not that I've got an excuse. It was just…. I couldn't."

"Believe me, I do know." Giles set aside his empty mug and shifted in the chair to face her more completely. "I knew you were essentially alright, the same way you were sure about me, I suspect. I won't lie, I was worried. But I do understand that grief is a very private thing."

"I can't talk about that part, the grief part yet," she warned.

"I'm not asking you to," Giles said simply.

She studied his face for insincerity, for greedy prying behind his eyes, but there was none. He looked at her almost as if he did know already everything that had happened that day, as if he understood. He must have figured out that she'd killed Angelus to save the world, if he had talked to Joyce and she had been willing to show him the note then he certainly did, but was it possible that he knew Willow's spell had worked? Giles was smart, he was good at putting clues together, and he knew magic. But he couldn't have been there when Willow made her second attempt, not in the condition he'd been in. Maybe he knew, or maybe he only thought he knew, but she wasn't going to wade into any of that tonight. Not if she wanted to be coherent enough to go to make her shift in an hour, which she had to be. She'd spent too much this month, she'd been too sick of packaged food and had gone to the nice supermarket to splurge on meat and real produce and a big bag of nectarines - - stupid how fast groceries could add up. She felt better now, but she couldn't afford to miss any work or she'd never catch up.

Or maybe it wouldn't matter, maybe she wasn't staying in LA after all. Buffy couldn't, with Giles there in front of her, honestly say to herself that she wanted to maintain this removed and careful holding pattern for the rest of her life. She looked at him and thought about Sunnydale. She looked at him and thought about their Library, thought about their training sessions that worked her mind and body until she was quiet and limp and not afraid. She looked at him and thought about the way secrets could thrill, sometimes, without biting, about how good it was to have a secret-partner to turn to who knew what to do when you didn't. Those were things she had missed this slow summer without even realizing she had missed them until now being confronted with their previous lack.

But still, she couldn't back. She knew that. She didn't understand it, but she felt it with her whole body. Not yet, not tonight, not tomorrow. Maybe not until she figured out why going back felt impossible, like offering herself up for slow-crushing death. If it wasn't because the monsters, which, absurdly, it didn't seem to be, then what?

"I have to start getting ready for work, soon. It's a bit of a walk," she said eventually, taking the easy way out of the conversation, but also worrying already how she would fit it in. She walked through it mentally, snack, shower, dry hair, put on her too-big uniform, walk to work, and tried to see if she could fold it smaller or ditch it all in order to bury herself in familiar Watcher time instead. She didn't want to leave Mike and Zosia in the lurch though, and wasn't quite ready make such a decisive step as skipping work and maybe giving up her place there.

Giles rose awkwardly, a little stiff maybe, or a little reluctant, but sensing he was being shown the door. He was still tall, still an incongruous, unmistakable presence. Buffy wanted to stop him, tell him to stay right exactly there for her to go to work and come back, just in case he vanished in the interim. They both needed space, though, probably. And she was surprisingly shy of showering with him in the other room, and of him seeing her in that awful uniform.

"Of course. I took a room for a few days at least," said Giles, "I'll give you the details. I intend to stay in town, and we can work some of this through- if… if that would help?"

"Yeah," she said, so relieved that she felt lightheaded, "yes, it really, really would."


	3. LA: and Sympathy

A bit of Giles point of view. We're beginning to wade into the issues. Part 3 of 4 or 5 in the LA stave of this story.

* * *

Buffy floated through her shift in a daze. She screwed up enough orders that Ray, the night cook, snarked at her for making him look bad and then asked if she was alright. She caught Mike as he was leaving for the day and asked to trade shifts so she could have the next day off. Since she'd not yet asked for any sick days, Mike didn't hesitate for long but he looked at her askance as well.

"You okay, Anne? Just yesterday you were asking for extra hours."

"I know, but. I need tomorrow, something's come up."

He studied her hard, making a concerned father face like he used when talking about how his son wanted to learn to skateboard and kept falling down. "Okay, kid, I bet one of the girls is free to step in. You remember what I said though, Ray, Karl and I know how to get pesky guys to go away."

"I'm fine, Mike. Nothing like that," said Buffy, embarrassed but holding her head high so that he'd see she wasn't lying.

She patrolled on her way home, sketching a weaving slalom of a path towards her building. She didn't even think about it, but she did it, keeping her hands stuffed deep in her coat pockets, fingers wrapped loose around her stake. Her ears listened for disturbances and so did the sense that was like hearing but wasn't, that lived at the base of her skull. Giles had called it honing years ago, and out loud she called it her spidey sense to make them laugh and think of her less like freak-girl, but inwardly she didn't call it anything. It was too acute and too instinctive to separate out from her regular hearing, tasting self. She listened to a vampire follow her for two blocks. She let it get close, slowing down enticingly, and then darted down an empty side street, stake poised ready. When it chased with the usual eerie growl of the hunt, she caught it and dusted it without even a scuffle. It wasn't the first vampire she'd staked in LA, or even the tenth. It was just as shocking anyhow, a violent intrusion of the strange. Her heart beat so hard that she felt it in her shoulders, her hands. Her mouth tasted of pennies and sour city air.

When she got home, she called Giles at the number he'd given and told him she'd have the whole day free the next day, if he wanted to come by. He offered to take her out to a late lunch somewhere interesting, take advantage of the opportunity to eat somewhere other than one of the five acceptable Sunnydale restaurants was how he phrased it. If she were less bored and half-starved, she would have felt awkward about Giles taking her out when she knew she could only supply the tip at most, but it was too wonderful a suggestion to turn down. Let him be nice to you, she thought, or he's going to smother you with fussing later on.

"I got a vamp on the way home," she told him, neutral and testing. What are you testing, she wondered.

"Are you alright?" Giles asked, casual-worry not panic-worry.

"Yep, just fine. Easy one," Buffy said, suddenly proud her one no fuss kill, as well as the return to the familiar.

When Angelus was on the loose, she had gotten back into the habit of calling Giles after patrol. With so much uncertainty, he had liked to know how she fared and she had liked to know that he was coping well enough at home alone with his ghosts that he could answer the phone and talk calmly and sensibly with her. Some of those conversations had been so brief that an outsider might have found them terse to the point of rudeness. Some of them had stretched aimlessly as she or he had come up with reasons to stay on the line, in order to have a conversation that wasn't mainly false reassurance. In order to have a reason not to turn out the light, give up on the day, and try to decide that it was safe to go to sleep that night.

Though it was a ritual born of an ordeal that lasted only five months, it had become an important signpost in her day. She had felt wholly unable to call him after she'd left, but it had been very strange on those nights when she had patrolled the streets of LA and had come home after, and sat on the side of her bed realizing again that she had only herself to report to.

"Good. Get some rest," he told her kindly, "I'll see you tomorrow."

* * *

Giles gave himself a leisurely morning to get his thoughts in order. Without the prod of the school schedule his own circadian rhythm had shifted later and later, especially as he recovered from his injuries. Buffy's innate rhythms as a slayer made her a natural night owl, and if she was working evenings or nights at that diner of hers, it was likely that her own schedule now verged on the nocturnal. They had arranged for him to pick her up at two o'clock, a late lunch hour, but he doubted whether Buffy will have been up long or had breakfast by then. Maybe she would want brunch, he wondered if he ought to skip breakfast as well so as to avoid doubling up- it was bad etiquette, he'd always thought, to eat lunch food across the table from someone eating breakfast, rather stomach turning he'd felt when it was done to him. Then again, he had been drinking heavily in the period of his life when he had frequented cafes with friends, which had likely played a role in this sense of distaste. Or maybe she was already tired of waffles and eggs, no matter how refined the varietal. She would know a place, probably.

She was doing well here, he thought, even better than he'd expected. Much better than he had done when he'd packed his bags and left University. She was clean and fed and sober, and sober-eyed, as well as properly housed. He had a clarion sense of her present position, staring down the world with fierce determination, intent on carving out a small, comfortable bolthole for herself in an uncertain future. He wondered if she had any conception of how remarkable that was, in anyone let alone in a person her age and so recently stricken with grave hurts. He had struggled the night before, after he'd visited her, with shame newly fresh at the shambles he'd made of his youth - and on such thin grounds - when here was this sweet young woman in his charge, who was clearly lost and grieving but still knew that she must protect herself, not tear herself to pieces.

He found had himself thinking a lot about that time lately, far more than he had since the five or so years of steady self flagellation that had immediately followed. His rebellion had lasted well more than two years, and after his prolonged recuperation after Randall's death and his uncle's intervention, he hadn't finished his studies or taken his final exams at Christ Church College until he was 24. There had been another stretch after that, where he had protested to his mother, grandmother and uncle that he was no longer morally or emotionally fitted to take on the role of Watcher, no matter what heritage he was letting down. He had planned to retire to the country and help his grandmother and the farm manager run the estate, and lived a quiet, unthreatening life far from the temptations of magick and blood. His grandmother had been willing to back his refusal, and his plan, not at all eager to see her only grandson at the front lines of the War. But she had worried that he would have regrets later in the cloistered scholar's life he'd proposed, that he had wasted his talent and his birthright, spent them on the poison of guilt. She had given him her own diaries to read from her time as Watcher and guardian to the Slayer Dorothea Stott. He only had to read one of them before he reported to the Academy.

By that time he was three or four years older than the rest of his class of Watchers in Training, and even older than those who joined up without University degrees on the strength of their names and exams alone. Combined with the burden of his rebellion and recovery, he found himself by those small margins alone surprisingly isolated from his peers.

Buffy did not have years to indulge as he had. He had been angry and frightened, weak to temptation, and overwhelmingly ambitious when he realized what pleasure and command his power could give him. Thankfully, he did not see in his Slayer the same taste for reckless abandon, or for trying to seize in kind what compensation she was owed for her suffering.

For someone so independent and possessed of such strong opinions in some areas of her life, she was startlingly ruthless at subduing herself to outwardly thankless and grueling situations. The way she was treated by her fellow students, the boiled pottage of American public approved imitation academics served up in her classes, which she bore with cheerful grumbling and seemingly no awareness that other students in other places received better. The way she made infinite allowances for her friends' teasing and their at times hurtful willful cheer and bewilderment in the face of her responsibilities. The way she bore her mother's treatment with only small outbursts of frustration or rebellion.

He remembered a time or two when Buffy came back to their library to continue preparations of some kind after a fight with her mother. She hadn't been angry, but quiet and still in a way that was unnatural to her. Shell shocked, perhaps, or so deeply shored up against judgement that he had no sense of what she was feeling. He had asked what was wrong, picked gently for details, but he had been rebuffed with a half mumbled complaint and blank, lost look in her eye that frightened him. Joyce was a difficult woman, he'd found, who could be cold and punitive, even in her fury, even those moments when he expected a mother to be proud.

He had met with Joyce several times over the long summer and had come to know her better, though not understand her. He had previously been confounded at the apparent rift between mother and daughter, Buffy being such a warm, patient, true hearted girl and Joyce always seeming so kindly and smiling. He could see it more clearly now, had seen stark and unpleasant sides of his Slayer's mother that the woman would surely have never let him see if he had not fallen so far from her good opinion. He was glad to have seen glimpses of that aspect of what Buffy faced, but he worried. They would be going back to Sunnydale eventually. No matter what Buffy pretended to herself in the meantime, he knew that she was eaten away by the sense of duty unattended there and would lead them back before long. The tenuous peace and the veneer of the ordinary Buffy had lived in before the terrible crisis last May depended largely on her security in her mother's house. Now the Summers mother and daughter faced each other in a conflict immense and minute, complex and largely opaque to him and well beyond his comfortable province of understanding. Facilitating a reconciliation would inevitably fall to him, and he didn't mind the burden but at the prospect he felt so wildly out of his depth, and also aware he was nearly as implicated in the conflict as Buffy and Joyce. And he was biased, of course, deeply, irrevocably biased, that was as it should be, he knew, but he knew it might lead him towards blundering missteps.

He didn't know if she wanted that buffer of normalcy back, but he remembered how much, how violently he had craved the small comforts and routines of his own childhood and the presence figures therein once he was sober and coherent enough to begin to rebuild. He'd been lucky, he had come to grips with that recently. Even after he had behaved so badly, Uncle Magnus had made sure that he stayed clear of the courts and the law, that all doors remained open to him, had been disappointed and grim-faced but infinitely patient. His mother and grandmother Adela had been frustrated and sad but kind, so very kind. They had hovered around him and treated him gently, doting and worrying over him like he was once again the boy they had sent off to school at age eleven, all three of them guilty and grieving and trying to make up for what had been lost. His family had kept for him a wellspring of love and forgiveness, he had not been turned out for his sins and left to fend for himself, even though such treatment would have been well justified.

No, he didn't understand Joyce Summers, gifted as she was with such a remarkable daughter. Giles wasn't sure that he wanted to. All he could do was to support Buffy in this time of crossroads, as she had so aptly put it, and try to follow her lead.

The unending warm weather and dry air of southern California unnerved him, especially as the world turned its head away from the sun and the skies out to be drawing in around them, wooly, wet and dim. It made it simple to pack, though, and simple to dress. He readied himself with deliberation, still eschewing the uniform of the Librarian with it's appearance of authority but then again something nicer than the ratty old fleece he'd worn for a comfortable drive down. He wanted to look like presentable, unobjectionable company for Buffy.

She never seemed to be aware of the possible appearances of the two of them together, she, a sweet, vibrant young thing, and he, a tall, awkward man rapidly and regretfully approaching a certain age. Though everything between them was as honorable and respectful as he knew how to be, though he regarded her as friend and held for her the esteem of a doting mentor for his fiercely talented charge, Giles knew that the company they kept might very well look like something else to outsiders. At least here in the city they were anonymous, not the moderately infamous figures they were in Sunnydale.

Giles made it from his drab business hotel to Buffy's apartment building without the aid of the crystal pendulum and locator spell this time, after a few false starts. LA traffic was as vile as he'd always heard it was, but it was vile in a different way than London, a wholly different rhythm. It wasn't a nice neighborhood, and even with her special talents he didn't like to think of her walking around there by herself late at night. He wondered if it might be better to find different accommodations, nearer to where Buffy was living, just in case (in case of what, he didn't like to think). Then again she might not want to feel hovered over. He would ask later, if he remembered.

He took a few moments at Buffy's chalk-blue painted door to compose himself and order his thoughts, had been trying to all through getting ready, all the way across town, but they would not order. She answered quickly, apartment so small after all she could not have been so far away, and drew him in with a small, quiet smile and a light hand on his wrist. Her studio was on the corner of the fifth floor, windows on two walls and above the roofline of some of the next door buildings, so his first impression of the place today was a fullness of warm, yellow light billowing in through thin white curtains. The air smelled cold, and clean, like citrus, a welcome change from the musty stairwell.

Buffy closed the door behind him, and then surprised him with a swift and rib-binding embrace, her small strong hands digging in against his back, her face against his shoulder and hiding there - his hands fluttered uncertainly for a moment before they settled, she did not often ask for this. He felt her breath roughly, and then she was away, at arm's length. He looked down at his hands, still settled at her shoulders, almost drew her back again but it seemed too much to ask. How tiny she was, just a small slip of a girl, he didn't ignore this about her but so often her energy, her vividness, the bright force of her will outpaced small fineness of her, but last night, today, much of the brightness seemed drained away, or compressed inside all furled. He gripped her shoulders hard and let her go. Her eyes, when they met his, looked large and wet and lost, but he watched her compose herself and smile for him again.

"Hi," she said, chagrined, "Sorry, it's been… I don't know. Too much time to think this morning, I guess. I started to wonder if I'd imagined your visit yesterday. Too good to be true."

"Oh, Buffy," he said, throat thick with guilt, "Should I have come to find you sooner? I thought you were reasonably contented here."

She shrugged expressively, familiar a gesture of body and face, as if to say what do I know, I just work here? "I needed the space from everything. And obviously, it's not like I'm ready to go back even now. And I do kinda like what I've got going. But… it's like, suddenly it's starting to feel real that I left. I left you. I left everything. How did I do that?" She shook her head, looking bewildered.

"Hmm. It's a strange feeling, looking back at what you've done in the grips of extremity," he said, following her to the little patch of kitchen, coming to lean lightly against the short stretch of counter between fridge and sink. "Like someone's shuffled you onto a train while you were half-asleep and sent you off, and you've woken up elsewhere with no clear idea of how or why."

"Yeah," she agreed with surprised vehemence, turning to face him so quickly her ponytail swung. "Yeah, exactly. And you're both the shuffler and the shuffle-ee. Ugh, it's such a weird feeling. But I swear I'm not going nuts."

"Of course you're not. Or no more than you ought to be in the situation we're in. I'd be far more worried if hadn't reacted at all."

"I guess so," she agreed and then peered up at him in assessment and sympathy, "You summarize the weirdness from experience, don't you?"

"Yes, well… yes. After what you're thinking of, but before it too. How I came to be where I was, when. And the worst, not the worst part of course," he corrected with a wince, thinking back to that which had been incalculably worse, always, but then again strangely easier to communicate, "but the most galling part was how everyone would ask 'but why did you?' and I didn't have anything coherent to tell them. Mostly nothing at all to tell them, in fact."

"Well. I won't ask if you don't," Buffy offered, half in jest, but clearly still with some earnest nerves.

"I don't mind talking about my past with you, Buffy," he offered gently, "But remember what I said yesterday, I'll not ask if that's what you'd prefer."

"Okay. That's good," she said, her mood lightening, turning self deprecating, "because all you'd get right not is an 'I don't know.'"

"What about if I asked you what you want to do for lunch instead?"

"Oh, whoops, lunch! I forgot we were going to go out and jumped straight in with the heavy stuff." She laughed, made a little face. She was more animated than she'd been the night before, he breathed a little easier to see her more present in her own skin.

"To be honest, that's an I don't know, too. I haven't been eating out much, except at the diner. A lot of the restaurants in this neighborhood seem kinda…. Grotty."

"I have the car," he said, "Let's go a little farther afield then, find something nice."

* * *

They ended up at a dim and surprisingly capacious chinese restaurant where the english on the menus was scanty (Giles was no help with the Mandarin, most of the near dozen languages he could read were not still in use by modern people) but the food was wonderful. Buffy told him all about Zosia and Marlene, Mike, gregarious Ray, and Karl the inordinately bashful day cook. She talked about how funny it was spending time with people so stolidly normal, who lived with unstudied ignorance. Not like in Sunnydale where the people who didn't know had to be carefully blinding themselves to it, these were people whose lives were utterly untouched by the night.

"Like being a spy in their midst, or something," she said.

In turn Giles told her some about his turns in graduate programs, his work among researchers and academics and collectors at the museum. There had been people he'd known there who knew in oblique ways about the other, the more real work, but to them it had been myth and fairytale, stupid superstition to be laughed off. There had been whole periods of his life, sometimes clutches of years at a time, he reflected, when he'd been expected to live on the surface and pretend that that was all that there was.

"Of course we're all required to stay current, stay fit, and keep up with the rota for fieldwork. But there were times I had to let it all fade into the background. I don't know that compartmentalization is healthy but it's better than getting paralyzed by cognitive dissonance."

"I have a hard time not obsessing," she confessed, stirring the ice at the bottom her glass with her straw, "about all of it. I mean, not just since last Spring, but since the beginning. Yeah, in a lot of ways it's become status quo, now, but I keep getting the feeling that my perspective on regular people things and normal points of reference has been permanently warped."

She needed coping mechanisms, he thought, but he didn't know what to suggest. He'd never been one much for coping either, just obstinacy and denial and liberal applications of guilt. He wanted Buffy to find something better, but lately it had become more and more clear to him that he was lost and weak as well, not the wise and knowing avatar of purpose he was meant to be. His sense of direction, or of self preservation, had never been very strong.

"The Council oughtta keep some therapists on staff," she said, "You try to talk about the mystical grabbag of pain we deal with to the regular kind and things get ugly, but I can't imagine that anyone in the business really comes out unscathed."

"They do employ some, after a fashion," he admitted with a wry, wincing recollection stern-faced advisors with their nebulous disapproval and their papery sympathy. They always had a way of making him feel a shamefaced child, caught breaking half understood rules. "However, I don't think you'd like them very much."

"No, I think probably not," she said with a bitter laugh.

He paid the bill while she boxed up the remaining dumplings from their over-eager array of sampling. Sunnydale didn't have such a thing as an authentic chinese restaurant, let alone one that served a dim sum lunch.

He insisted she take the leftovers, reminding her that he was in a hotel for the duration. She accepted graciously, but with a smile that said she was onto him. He wondered if she would allow him to give her grocery money, or if she would find it too intrusive a step from someone in his position - an adult, a mentor, someone who could have too much power over her. It was his purpose to be the Slayer's bank of resources, and that meant keeping her healthy as much as anything, but he'd always sensed her discomfort with that idea. She was a contradictory girl, generous with her time and affection and care, but downright miserly when it came to accepting the same from others.

He promised that they would speak again soon, and they parted ways. After he left her at her apartment building, Giles noticed that they had managed to avoid talking about the future entirely.

* * *

They met again the next night after her shift. He met her in front of the diner, as arranged, though Buffy seemed briefly startled to see him there. She wore a dark blue coat over a white and red uniform, both a bit too big on her.

She looked tired, he thought. He realized, as she stepped into the uneven spill of sodium lamplight and looked up at him, that her face had changed in the months she'd been away. Just slightly, but enough to notice, as though her features had become more resolved, her gaze more clear and canny. As though more of her girlhood had been pared away. He knew that every youth must go through it, the most archetypal story was the coming of age. But in Buffy's case the walk from childhood had been a forced march, and the lessons along that road had been meted out with unjust viciousness. He looked away.

Giles walked beside her on a vague patrol, a half step behind, letting her lead. They passed the occasional homeless person whiling the night, or partier heading home, were passed by cars. Buffy was recognizably on alert but they came across nothing out of the ordinary. No inhuman creatures of the night.

Giles told her that he had spoken with her mother, more than once. That he had seen the note that she had left. That Joyce was angry and worried and deeply conflicted. That he understood now why Buffy had waited until it was unavoidable to tell her mother the truth of her Calling.

"But you said it had to be a secret," she protested, all aggressive guilelessness.

"Really, and you've always done just as I've requested, down to the very letter, yes?" he drawled.

She laughed, turned to look at him in easy acknowledgement, yeah, okay, you got me. "I do exactly what you ask when I agree it's the right thing, I don't do that for just anybody, you know," she joked, teasing them both.

"Yes, of course. And that's why I thought you would tell her before a month had passed after your arrival."

"Looking at Willow and Xander, I see how you could think that, but. The first time I tried that, it did not go great. She told you her version of that, right? The version where she's brave and guilty and oh so justified?"

"I… yes, something along those lines. I'm sorry that you went through that, Buffy. I hadn't realized…"

"No, well, would you advertise it around that you'd been psych hold kid? And then after the doctors told them I was 'just acting out to get their attention,' they were really sorry, but they also never wanted to talk about it. At all. We didn't deal with it. The only thing I could do was pretend it hadn't happened."

"For what it's worth, I think your mother regrets very profoundly that she didn't believe you," he said, trying to reassure. So much evidence in front of her for so long though, and seemingly a poor grasp of her own daughter's character. Denial was an ugly thing. "Not that that takes away your right to feel hurt and angry, or makes what happened any less."

"It's not like I can blame her. I live with it all the time and sometimes even I… Anyway, there's been a dozen horrible things since then, and then some. I think I have to call it water under the bridge for Calamity Buffy," she said bravely. Then after a long pause, as they crossed the street and peered down another empty alley, she spoke again in a much smaller voice.

"Does she really believe it this time? Is it sticking? Because I thought I'd gotten through to her that parents visit night when Spike and his gang attacked, but. Nope."

"Yes, having had a number of talks with her this summer, I'm… reasonably certain that has faced up to realities."

"And she hates us for it, right?"

"She doesn't hate you. She is very upset, and I won't lie, things there are likely to be very difficult, but you cannot believe that hate is at the root of it."

"No, I know. I was talking hyperbolical hate, Giles."

"I do think she may very truly hate me, though," he complained with theatrically wounded pride, and she laughed, as he had hoped.

"I don't know though," Buffy admitted later, coming back to the subject. They were paused in the coral tiled vestibule while she found the key to her building's lobby (she hadn't asked how he'd gotten in that first night without being buzzed in, but then she'd seen him get past locked doors before) to let them in. "I don't think that's really why I didn't."

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't tell my mom about the big destiny thing. Not that she wouldn't have believed me, because if I'd really wanted to convince her, I could have done some stupid feat of strength or taken her on patrol or something. But she could have made the slayer stuff even more complicated. She would have tried to micromanage that, too, like she did with school and friends and skating or whatever. And she just kept assuming I'd gone stupid and shallow and boy crazy, which. Kinda turns out she was more right that I thought."

"That's simply not true, Buffy. Perhaps you were too trusting, but not-"

She made a dismissive noise and waved him off. "Not the point. The truth is, I knew that I was doing this special, important thing, that I was being responsible. And I got to thinking, well, if she can't see how hard I'm working to keep it all together, then maybe she deserved to go on assuming I was some kind of flighty airhead."

He stopped below her on the stairs as she carried on, struck by how bitter she sounded, how sad and young and defensive. What a miserable, protracted, needling battle of wills it could be between mother and daughter when things went wrong. His heart squeezed in sympathy.

"Buffy, that's…"

"Nice, huh," she said, viciously sarcastic, "God, no wonder she doesn't trust me."

"It was an impossible situation," he said, which sounded a stupid, hollow platitude in his ear. He hurried to catch up to her again, trying to think of something reassuring, something to leaver off some of the blame she wanted to lay on her own shoulders. "It's a parent's job to be supportive, to try to understand their child even when that child is making choices they don't like."

This appeared to make no impact with Buffy. She simply bowed her head and carried on. He bore responsibility here too, he realized, he ought to have forced the issue months or even years back. He should have seen that leaving Joyce in the dark for so long would have ugly consequences, or that Buffy's avoidance of the issue grew from something more deep-rooted and tangled than a child's impulse of secret keeping. What did he know about modern American parenting? Or about parents and teenagers, full stop? He who had been sent away to Crawford, to be prepared for University and Watcherhood, where he'd been minded loosely by Prefects and Head Boys and Professors, whose methods he'd found himself unconsciously emulating with Buffy and her friends - not the same thing at all. He should not have assumed.

"I'm sorry," Giles said simply, and touched her shoulder in sympathy. This at least she didn't shrug off.


	4. LA: waking up

The last weeks of September petered away in a strange jumble of intense conversations and drowsy boredoms. Buffy gave Mike her notice at the diner. She knew that she would go back, of course she would, there had never really been any questions. All that was left was the foot dragging and rationalizations, and the vague hope that if she stalled long enough maybe if she was gone long enough, her mother would be happy to see her back instead of angry that she'd left.

The thought of Sunnydale filled her with a sick, heavy, dreadful feeling, not panic exactly, but hopelessness or refusal. It made her head buzz with conflicting impulses but it was an inevitability and she understood that she must come to grips with it - somehow. She held the image of that return up over and over in her mind, like peering through an indistinct slide that only grew more hazed the more she tried to resolve it. She hoped that with practice she would become desensitized to the idea, that by the time she followed through it would no longer hold the dry-ice burn of horror, and it would be just another thing on her list of things to do.

Giles was amazingly patient, but then usually he was. It was different without the token grumbling though, without their little usual noise of push and counter-push that often made up the noisy surface of their work life.

Of course she and Giles weren't exactly keeping up the work part, either. Some patrolling, some running in the nearest park when he bid her do a whole lap or two to take the manic edge off before he fell into step beside her and even still got winded much earlier than she was used to. Buffy had figured out why he looked so skinny in his clothes, he'd had to stop training while he was recuperating, of course, of course, she felt stupid for not getting it right away. When she realized she had swallowed a shiver of backwards-looking fearful helplessness, seeing what she should have seen at the time, how close a call Giles had had, and how grievously he must have been injured. He was like her, didn't stop training or working unless he was pretty much falling over. She didn't say anything about any of these thoughts to him, knew it would make him feel uncomfortable and old. She kept her mouth shut and took more water breaks than she strictly needed and let him slowly increase the length of the route.

She hadn't trained at all since May either, had been so sedentary that her muscles hadn't been sore once in all those months, and was embarrassed to realize that she needed the slow start almost as much. The Slayer healing was wondrous on wounds but it worked against the early stages of getting in shape, building and maintaining muscle strength. She could survive on memory, reflex and enhanced ability alone but that wrecked her stamina and made it more likely that she would be hurt or hurt herself in a fight. She had been letting it go because she just didn't have the energy left over to care about the consequences, but knowing Giles needed to be moving too helped.

Over the course of a few conversations holed up in her flat, with late afternoon sunlight in the windows to remind them that they were safe, she told him what had happened that last day. Xander choosing not to tell her about the Willow's second attempt, winning the fight only to have that change come over Angel, watching his eyes suddenly become inhabited by spirit-substance, the bond between vessel and soul remade. He'd looked like a little boy, so confused and gentle, with the hungry mouth of apocalypse behind him. She'd had no choice. She knew that. One death to stop the torment of mankind was a simple equation.

Angel would have made the same choice, if there had been time to explain. She knew that even in the very moment of deciding to strike the blow. She'd begun to have doubts about many things regarding Angel in the last few months, but she never wavered in her understanding that when he was a thinking being with a soul, he was a true knight in the War. He was a defender against darkness. He was willing, even eager in his quest for sacrifice in penance. He would have walked into the portal willingly and without hesitation if she could have told him what was needed before it had opened too far to stop. She's sure that he would even have thrust the sword through his own heart if he'd known it would save the world. This ought to have been a comfort to her. It should have made the memory of her actions easier to bear, but it didn't.

"The truth is," she confessed to Giles, studiously watching her hands wash their lunch plates in the sink, "that I didn't want to save him." She felt the rushing terror of confession fly through her and let the dishes clatter to the bottom of the empty basin, braced her hands on the edge of the counter so that she wouldn't tremble.

"You didn't?"

Buffy shook her head, mute with effort. She watched Giles' hand reach slowly across her and shut off the tap. She didn't flinch. She didn't look at him. She felt his patience, his confusion, his waiting gaze. She had shocked him, she realized.

"I'm not as good and forgiving as you thought. That's what I realized this Summer," she told the stretch of dingy tile behind the sink. "I had to do it to save us all, but I was relieved. He was Angel again. He had no idea what was going on and he looked so scared. But I was still _relieved_ to condemn him, to murder him. God, I don't know. I loved him and I pitied him but I hated him, too. So much."

"He hurt you a very great deal, Buffy. You are allowed to hate him for that."

"But that wasn't him!" She turned to face Giles, daring him to contradict. She clutched at her own arms with her wet hands. "That wasn't Angel with a soul, it was the demon. I out of everybody should have been the first to understand that and forgive him for what he couldn't control!"

"Really? Is that what you believe? You were Angelus' central target for months," Giles said, his voice was patient but strained, like he was trying to lead her somewhere specific. "One would be reasonable in thinking that you were too close to the issue to be objective."

"For all those months he tortured me by attacking us all over and over, and doing it while wearing the face of the man I loved, using that against me because he knew that I could never really stop him, because he looked like… And it worked. For so long. But then… it was like he'd dangled me over the fire for too long. I stopped being able to feel it. The parts of me that still loved him went numb, or they'd been burned away, or I don't know, they just stopped working. Every good memory turned into something that hurt and made me hate him. But then just like that, Angelus was gone and Angel was whole again. He was so helpless… I should have wanted to protect him, love him. But he was still wearing the face of… Of that _thing._ It was like…" she searched for a way to make sense of the sorry, weeping revulsion she'd felt, the loss but coupled with it the stark certainty of wrongness, "Like when you have to look at something very dead and maimed, it's pitiful and tragic and it shouldn't be able to hurt you because it's so far gone, but it's still so _horrible_ that you can't breathe."

"What you, what we went through, was true and legitimate torment at his hands," Giles said, his voice cracking over it like the torment was still a live coal inside him too. She looked at his flushed, haunted face, and then looked aimlessly passed him at the blank space between the window behind him and the battered dresser against the far wall. The effort having of this conversation in fully formed words seemed to make it so that her eyes wouldn't focus properly.

"It isn't wrong that you are angry at him for hurting you," he said, his voice firm and his posture in her blurry periphery stiff with deliberateness. "People can't differentiate that way, I'm not sure that we're meant to. If he'd been a human who had been a violent drunk, or had had a psychotic break or was in some other way not exactly culpable for his actions but still brutally dangerous, you wouldn't be asked to forget the abuse you had suffered. This isn't different than that just because the supernatural is involved."

"I murdered him. I knew he had a soul again. I was glad that it was finally all over." her voice was harsh. She was trying to shock him, make him see what she was.

"The Angel that I knew before the curse was broken would have urged you to do exactly what you did," said Giles, implacable.

She took a deep breath and let it out slow. "I know."

"If you had hesitated, the hell dimension would have come here and he would still be suffering."

"I know."

"You fulfilled your duty to humanity. Would you still have slain him if the acathla wasn't opening?"

"No! would have been more time, I could have thought, talked to him. Tried to explain. Tried to come to terms with him changing back, I don't know." She shook her head, dismissive. He didn't seem to understand that her actions weren't so pleasantly justifiable. "I didn't want to, though. I didn't _want_ to deal with him."

"Not wanting to make yourself vulnerable to the man who hurt you isn't a sin, Buffy." Giles stepped in front of her, blocking view of the middle distance nothing where she'd been staring. He was surprisingly close but she couldn't back up any farther because of the cabinets already digging into her legs, so she had to look at him. He smelled of lemon dishwashing soap and tea. He was looking at her with far too much sympathy. "I am your Watcher," he said gravely, "Trust me when I say that everything I know of you tells me that you would have done everything you could for him, no matter what it cost you. The anger you feel, the impulse to protect yourself from those who harmed you repeatedly, those are healthy instincts, not reasons to punish yourself."

"I'm not punishing myself."

"Aren't you?"

She turned away instead of answering, barking her knee on the cupboard door. She reached into the sink and rinsed off the two clean plates again and set them gently in the drying rack as if jarring them would set off something awful. She liked it here, didn't she? Her tiny hideaway of safety, hard won and carefully kept, not a punishment at all. Or was that really what really what he meant?

Buffy turned her head to watch him in spite of herself, braced for judgement.

"Buffy, listen. I can't tell you that I'm an impartial observer in this. I have lost too much and been hurt too badly, I was forced to watch you be beaten and harassed and terrified by that- that…. Monster that took over. If you must know, I'm glad too. Glad that you are here, alive and whole. Relieved that we're all free of each other and recovering, not now catering to his guilt or finding out that he was not put right after all. Glad that he is safely gone."

Giles's voice was all tight-wound anger, his expression pleading and defiant and bare of restraint, shockingly direct. He was daring her to deny his right to these feelings, this resentment. She could see the memory of fear in his eyes, and remembered the dreams she had been given, his crooked fingers, the smell of blood. Buffy warred with herself, the instinct to protest that only she was allowed to express these base furies, only she, the central figure in the drama, and the remembrance that by bare-faced accounting, Giles had been hurt more materially and undeservedly than she. He was being honest, she knew that, showing her that her reaction was not singular, that whether right or wrong, she was not alone.

It had been both of them at the center of Angelus' wrath, she realized with a slow bloom of sympathy, not just herself. They two had been his closest allies, his closest friends, his brothers in arms, who had treated him with human compassion. Angelus had wanted to blot that out, expunge them in return for their trust. Giles had let Angel into their circle, far into it, even before she had decided she loved him. Giles had admired him as resource, as fellow knight, as an able fighter with the light of wit in his eyes and many powerful stories to tell. She and Giles and both been taken in, and both been repaid in horrors and ashes.

Giles watched her reaction, trepidation plain, and then backed off, the fight going out of him. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

"Okay," she said, unsteadily, her stance relaxing, "Alright. So you understand. What it's like."

"Angel was a valuable ally, and I know that you cared about each other very much, but _nothing_ is worth the hell you went through. And I think that the Angel we knew before all of this would say the same," Giles told her, calm again and mild, with awful, clear-ringing compassion that tolled in her with unavoidable veracity, "If he were able, I think Angel would tell you that guilt isn't what he would want for you. He knew that you are a finer kind, and meant for better things than he was. He would have said to you what I also believe, that you carried out the will of the universe. It isn't pleasant for those of us waging this fight, it never has been, but it was necessary. You must face that is done, and cannot be undone, no matter how much regret and penance you try to take on."

She ran out of strength then, as if she had been fighting for hours, and began to fold in on herself. Buffy didn't cry, wondered abstractedly as she tried to catch her breath if she had left that ability behind somewhere last spring, but let Giles lead her to the armchair (a man's supporting hands are not soft at all in real life, she thought, not like in her mysteries with the detective gently holding his swooning client, instead his grip was hard and pinching because if he had eased off she would have fallen) and sat mute and numb while he brought her a glass of water.

"I don't like to think about it," she mumbled, swimming through embarrassment and the bruising absence of tears, "It makes things go all funny and sometimes I have to lie down, or sometimes I have to go buy fluffy towels or tea I won't drink. Or sometimes I get on a bus."

"Drink your water, Buffy," Giles scolded. His voice sounded thick, like he was trying not to cry, which was a sound she knew too well now. She avoided looking at him because him crying and her not crying would absolutely be worse. He cleared his throat briskly. "You were hyperventilating, I think. May I check your pulse?"

Buffy tucked her free hand under her knee, not feeling like playing patient when she knew that she wasn't sick or injured or under a spell.

"I'm fine. I mean physically. Nothing physically is wrong with me. Yeah, I felt for a while last summer like someone went at my brains with an egg beater, but that was a thought-based thing and I'm mostly better now. It's like I'm waking up, even if I don't completely want to be."

Giles hummed noncommittally and paced over to the window, hands deep in his pockets.

"Okay, so I'm a little bit glitchy still, but hey, I stopped a demon and an apocalypse, gave up the love of my life, and moved to a new city all in one morning a while back, so I figure I've probably earned it." it was a shaky effort at her usual snark, still too pointed, and her heart still rattled around in her chest like a badly made tin toy, but it was a step up from sickly shock. She sipped her water and settled back.

Giles huffed a startled laugh. "Gallows humor, my god, where would we be without it. Well, likely being pried off of the ceiling by the sturdy men with the nets, I suppose. It's been near enough from time to time."

"They don't actually use the nets anymore, you know. But I'm sure if you asked nicely they would oblige."

* * *

It was sometime after that ordeal of a confession that Buffy also admitted that she had let her train go completely. When Giles expressed some dismay, she had gestured again at the 500 square feet of neat but packed studio apartment and asked where exactly she was supposed to have been working out. He'd conceded the point and admitted that there was still no room, but that if she was going to patrol then she still did need to keep up the work. That's when he devised a schedule of running between her remaining work days.

"It will help keep you more present in your body," he promised when she talked about the cloudy vagueness of the past several months that had urged her to lay low. "Exercise is no cure-all, but it's a good prompt to your brain and your senses to stay in touch with you."

She did start to feel better when they started training together again, simplistic as it was. Fresh air, swift motion, the tiredness that came from exertion rather than endurance, they were all like nourishment that she had forgotten that she'd craved. Giles knew these things, she supposed, knew them from both sides. She wished that she'd contacted him, trusted him much sooner to help her through her crisis of faith. The training was a step forward, at least, helped to remind her that her body was something she could trust.

* * *

Buffy asked him at one point if he'd called anyone back home, let them know where he was or she was, or any of it. He promised that he hadn't. He offered to be the one to reach out, if she thought it might go more easily, but she turned him down. It would have been an uncomfortable position to put him in, and she knew that when it came down to it Giles was no more easy and able than she was with difficult conversations. He had more tact, certainly, but he also struggled to articulate what he needed to say without getting talked over or turned around. Unless he was very, very angry of course, which was a situation she tried on the whole to avoid.

And Buffy knew that her friends, her mother, all of them would be even more hurt and upset if the only way she deigned to communicate with them was by proxy. Giles pointed out that total radio silence was not much more kind, and that his own conspicuous absence from town must, by that point be apparent. He didn't push the issue, though, just regarded her with sad compassion and laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder - what she had figured out by then was the reserved English public school boy's version of a comforting hug. She wanted to laugh sometimes at the irony, the bitter symmetry, they might have been Chosen for a Calling, but they really were the blind leading the emotionally-stunted blind.

Buffy had several shifts over her last two weeks. It was harder than it had been to get through the long, repetitive hours. Mike had asked her about the change in her plans when she gave her notice, if she was okay, if she was in trouble. She'd told him that she'd had word from home, the bad ex had cleared off ("Off the face of the planet, as far as anybody knows," she'd said) and she was free to go back and try to pick up the pieces. Mike was nice about it, happy for her in a casual way. He promised to give her a reference if she wanted and told her to call her family if she hadn't already. Mike was one of the pleasantly naive normal people who hadn't been forced to learn that there was more to family than loving and forgiving and good-natured griping. She had smiled and said thank you and moved on without argument.

* * *

She didn't really know what Giles did when he wasn't visiting her. What did an intelligent, introverted, particular Englishman do in an american city so centered around leisure, exibitionism and conspicuous consumption? Perhaps he went to museums. Perhaps he went shopping. Perhaps he holed up in his hotel room with his books and his Chronicle and tried to journal his way to a solution for them both. She hoped that at very least he was getting some rest, he'd looked exhausted when he turned up and their marathons and their sessions of ad hoc therapy weren't exactly helping. He stood straighter now though, he had better color. She was relieved to see that he had lost that grey, diffuse and nervy look of recent escape, and maybe readiness for imminent flight. That was good. One of them in a state of mind dangerously fragile was plenty, already more than they could afford. Maybe this break from Sunnydale was good for him, too.

One day she took Giles to the used book store that had become her regular haunt. She was surprised when Giles didn't exhibit surprise that she was voluntarily reading novels, but all he did was express admiration for the well stocked shelves and wait for a sign from her that he could go explore. She got her donation credit at the front desk and paused to think. She didn't more dry, stolidly plodding mysteries, she felt done with that, but she still wanted something for her spare time. She found Giles covetously eyeing a display of truly vintage books in a dimly lit and glass fronted display case.

She laughed fondly. "Of course it takes you just five minutes to find the old-olds. What do you do, sniff them out?"

"Perhaps I do. Part and parcel of the Watcher training."

"Anything good?"

"Hmm. Nothing useful, or terribly rare. That late-Victorian Alice is lovely. Gaudy, but lovely. Badly foxed, though, which I suppose is why it's here, not in a proper collection."

Rather than asking how one might fox a book, she asked him to recommend something to replace her now repetitive mysteries. He wasn't a lot of help, though.

"I'm sorry to say I haven't made much time for reading fiction in… oh, a frightfully long time. The last novel I read was that thing about the poets and their biographers that everyone and their aunt was recommending for a while. I'm not sure that I finished it, either, I seem to recall an…. incident in the French Alps that required multiple teams… well."

"Right. And then the amazingly-not-fiction of our real lives took over and good-bye reading list."

"Quite."

* * *

Another day Giles convinced her to let him take her shopping for decent groceries. This was something they never could have done together back home. Strangely enough, the simple, unobjectionable act of appearing together at the Safeway would by implication be damaging for Giles' reputation in ways that their regular night walks through the cemeteries were not. They argued over the list and Buffy minded the cart, and managed to let him pay without making a fuss in the checkout line. It was all thrillingly mundane. He even helped her carry the bags up, like she was a normal girl who earned such courtesies. Nobody looked at them askance the whole outing. The longer she spent in LA noticing the lack of suspicious glances and questioning stares, the more Buffy wondered if she truly was anonymous in Sunnydale, or if she and the townspeople just mutually pretended she was nothing out of the ordinary.

"Let me make dinner," Giles said, back at the apartment. Grocery bags threatened to spill off her tiny dining table. Buffy dug out a ripe orange from one such bag and began to peel it. She used the second dining chair as a bedside table, she'd have to clear it off if they were both to sit at the table.

"You can cook?" she asked, not startled by the thought that he could as much as his willingness to volunteer to cook for her.

"Decently well, I've been told," he said with shy pride, "not that I have the time very often, these days."

"Well, then, that is a very nice offer that I won't pass up, thank you. Anything I can do to help?"

"No, that's alright. I… I've had an idea, actually, for how to handle... What I thought is that you might like to do is to sit down and make a list. Not a shopping list," he interrupted before she could joke, "a list of roadblocks, if you will. I know you're resigned to going back, but I can also see that returning to Sunnydale is a miserable idea to you. I think you might find it helpful to break the issue down into smaller parts, and then we can see which things are solvable and find strategies for coping with the rest."

"Oh," said Buffy, startled. She looked up at him and saw only familiar, kind concern, not the calculation that these conversations tended to bring out in the people around her.

"Does that sound possible?" he asked hopefully.

"Yeah, actually," she said, "You just surprised me. Usually conversations I have with adults about my issues follow a certain pattern. Namely, 'everyone's unhappy, that's life, get over yourself and do it anyway.' Are you _sure_ that you're a grown up, Giles? Because this doesn't sound like that."

"Refusing to endure the unendurable is a mark of maturity, Buffy, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to manipulate you," he said, fierce and brittle. "if your role models are telling you that… Christ. Maybe it's not my place to say so, but I refuse to see how 'expect misery' is appropriate advice for a young person. No, I believe that mainly what you need is to learn is a better method of creating exit strategies."

"Which means….?"

"Leaving town completely may not have been the best choice, but the fact that you were protecting yourself and getting away from a destructive situation was a good thing. A healthy thing. What you need is to learn how to look at a problem that looks impossibly large and inescapable, and take it apart into its component problems so that we can tackle them without getting overwhelmed."

"Right. Just a simple, little brain rewiring solution, then."

"It's not easy, I do understand. It took me a number of years of post-adolescence and lot of embarrassing confrontations with family members before I listened to heads calmer and more experienced. A good portion of adults never learn the skill. But I've seen you do that very thing when we're in the midst of a demon oriented crisis. It's just a matter of applying those instincts to the other areas of your life."

"Alright, alright. For you, Giles, I will try to make lists. Go make us food," said Buffy, smiling, indulgent and flattered.

She retrieved the small spiral-bound notebook where she kept her budget from the kitchen drawer and cracked open the front windows for some cool, evening air. She pulled the curtains closed for privacy, the twilight outside and the lit lamp outside turning the glass into a dark mirror, and they rustled in an easy, reasonably fresh breeze. The air must have been coming in from the coast again for it was moist and didn't taste of smoke.

"Remember, the back right burner doesn't work," she warned lightly.

"Ah. Of course. And the oven?"

"Oh, the oven works fine. But the thermostat reads about fifteen degrees high. Round up and check often. Potholders on top of the fridge."

"Understood."

Buffy thought for a moment and then laughed, realizing and surprised at herself. "You know, I just had the weirdest thought. I'm actually starting to miss my mother's kitchen."


	5. LA: Transitions

The list of problems to solve had many parts. She started with the most obvious first. School , she wrote. And then; I'm expelled. Snyder hates me. Other options?

It wasn't like Sunnydale High was a school with a reputation for academic excellence, anyway. Her mother had chosen it simply on the grounds that they would enroll her, despite her police and hospital records. She supposed that she could get her mother to register her as homeschooled like a religious nut, and it still probably wouldn't look any worse on college applications.

Under that she concluded, But the hellmouth is on school grounds. And Giles and the Library. Also Willow and Xander. SHS it is .

* * *

"Did the council get you the job as librarian at the high school?" she asked Giles as they went over the list.

"Yes, I'm afraid they did. I was overqualified on the whole, as well as not at all trained as a librarian. Not an ideal candidate. Mr. Flutie was gracious about it though. He simply welcomed me aboard as though it was nothing out of the ordinary."

"I miss him. He was nice. Snyder isn't going to happy to have me back. Do you think the Council can put a hand on the scale, and possibly a foot and a couple of lead weights, to get me re-enrolled?"

"I'll see what I can do," he promised, "You're going to have an awful lot of makeup work, you do realize that."

"Yeah, but between you and Willow I'm probably better off than with teachers there anyway. Plus, everything about this is going to be humiliating, so it can't be that much worse begging for homework from classroom to classroom. Right?"

"Never mind about that. I'm sure that with my faculty privileges and the help of the counselor, we can get something set up for you that won't be quite so… onerous."

* * *

Next she wrote, the gang probably isn't very happy with me right now. She thought for a long while and added, I don't think I regret leaving all that much, so that's going to be tricky . And then another painful admission, But Angelus was my fault so I have a lot to make up for .

"So this one feels lousy to say but…. Willow and Xander. They expect me to be a certain kind of way. They like bubbly, outgoing Buffy who protects and reassures them, and always puts them first."

"They're your friends," said Giles, surprised, "Do you really expect them to be so judgemental?"

"Remember when I was struggling after fighting the master? They didn't get it at all, even though we'd all been through stuff that day. They decided I was possessed ."

"That was a long time ago. They've all been through a lot since then. To be fair you had never let them see how much you struggle with being the Slayer before then, it's likely they were surprised. It's true, Xander and to a certain extent Willow haven't matured emotionally as quickly as you've had to, but you'll all be graduating this year. Surely they can process the idea that friendship isn't meant to be all putting on a brave face and pretending everything's fine. And if they can't, they can learn."

"It's easy to say that," she protested, "But I owe them all so much for sticking around after everything I put them through last year, this summer, all of it."

"Of the players involved in Angelus' curse, you are the only one blameless, Buffy. You must remember that," said Giles sharply.

"Maybe, I guess. But it doesn't mean it's easy to live down."

* * *

The next item on her list was just two words, Joyce Summers. Giles wanted her to break her problems down into smaller parts, and the issue of her mother was so complex, so full of conflicting needs and impulses that surely she should be able to come up with a dozen bullet points, and more, without effort. For some reason she couldn't, her thoughts whirled and stalled and chased each other and would not be pinned down. She scribbled a bold little box around her mother's name as though that would somehow contain her.

Then she wrote, if I'm grounded again I don't know what I'll do .

When Giles flipped through her list, later, he frowned at that part, and sighed deeply, full of frustration and regret. He didn't offer any suggestions, though, he just looked bewildered in a way that made her feel similarly lost, and small. It was a strange feeling seeing his concern, his startlement. No one usually noticed this aspect of her life. She'd been dealing with it on her own for a long time, and usually it seemed easier that way.

"Immovable objects," she reminded him, "unstoppable forces. It is what it is."

* * *

Hank Summers was having a day that was not going to plan. He had been scheduled to observe a photoshoot that morning, but the actress in question had been held up with reshoots on location in New England, unavoidably held up by the need for the right weather and the right fall color. The shoot was cancelled, rescheduled god knew when. He'd called up to sooth the frustrated photographer that he wasn't going to be blamed for the missed deadline. Then he'd spent a couple hours rearranging the mockup board for next month, he'd dropped by to chat with department heads, he'd let his assistant talk him out of calling an impromptu pitch meeting while everyone was busy buckling down to finalize the current issue.

He found himself holed up in his office, trying to find a way to fill a distinct lull. His office was beautiful, well proportioned, airy and expansive, recently redecorated in a tempered version of Scandinavian style with cognac colored wood and tawny leather replacing the glass and chrome and outrageous abstract art that his predecessor had favored. he enjoyed the time he spent there. He'd taken over as executive editor just a year ago, but he already felt so at home in the job and the corner office that he felt at times that he'd been doing it all his life.

Hank's ascension to the role had come about in an awkward jumble of sudden decisions and interpersonal dilemmas, when Roland Davis the executive editor who had mentored Hank, plucking him out of his bottom-rung job in the photo department 15 years before and have him steadily more responsibility, had decided all at once to divorce his wife, marry his mistress, and move to the north of France. Hank had known both wife and mistress, having been as close a friend as it was possible to be to a noted eccentric like Roland. He had also found himself looking after Christine and Julie each at various times in his old office while they cried and fumed and waited for Roland.

The absoluteness and the violence of Roland's passions was something he'd long admired in his mentor, but it was also something that made him uneasy. The way he had of believing in one idea with complete, manic certainty until all at once Roland had decided that it was wrong, a mistake, awful and not to be suffered again was something that had put the magazine behind schedule many times over the years, while Hank and the other department heads scrambled to keep up. Hank watched as that same quality laid waste to a marriage of 20 years and rattled the confidence of Julie, the lovely, young, and newly pregnant mistress. Hank was shocked to see how Roland had not tempered himself and his absolutism for the sake of the people around him, shocked at how the people in his life still loved him and clung onto him despite of it. Hank had been dismayed at himself for not thinking less of his mentor for the wreckage he'd left behind, and been also been dismayed to realize that he envied that hot and wicked end, the fighting to keep enacted upon him, and the wild light of certainty and joy in Roland's eyes as he had packed up and handed off the reigns. The dissolution of Hank's own marriage had been a cold thing, long and dragging, full of antagonism and diminishing returns, a relationship that, long before the end, neither of them had even wanted to save. Not to mention, Hank's own indiscretions had been brief, furtive, yearnings for comfort that he'd quickly regretted, not shattering loves on which to found a new life of fulfillment. It had been an uncomfortable thing watching from the periphery as his mentor's tenure ended, the office had seemed a powder keg of tension.

He'd been incredibly relieved when the torturous drama burned itself out and vacated the premises within a few months. He missed Roland at times, his quick unquestionable eye, his pithy comments, but Hank felt that he ran the ship with a steadier hand. True, Roland's reputation for genius had given him and the magazine legendary status, but the unpredictability made the advertisers nervous. Hank was holding his own, and earning a certain respect. They hadn't been late to print once in the last year, nor had there been a crying, yelling woman in the executive lobby. It did a lot for team morale.

Hank felt a profound pride in his editorship of this, the largest arts and culture magazine outside of New York. It was not pride of ownership, as one did not come to have a magazine that was finished and owned. It was a pride of accomplishment, of continual new work. An ongoing publication required constant attention, revision, reinvention, constant tearing down and building up and starting over, begging and cajoling and aiming for better. He was always busy, travelling often to represent the publication, or meeting with his staff, or playing shadow in the photo studio. His brain was always engaged and seeking inspiration. Though his personal life had become suddenly quite solitary in the last few years, he had little time for contemplation or regret, and he was far from dissatisfied with the current shape of his life.

Hank was contemplating ducking out for an early lunch when his assistant called. He had a visitor downstairs in reception, a young woman who said she was his daughter. He felt a cold jolt, fear and elation, formerly submerged images flashing in his mind, fifteen year old Buffy, tearful and angry, staring him down with furious, bright-eyed youthful righteousness, full of judgment for him. Buffy last year, the summer she'd come to stay with him through the long vacation, listless and distant, her pretty round face gone still and her thoughts contained somewhere further within and muffled. She had been alarmingly placid, indifferent even, and he'd showered her with gifts, trying to lessen the guilt that the sight of his peculiar daughter so subdued provoked in him. My god, he thought with piteous wonder, what's happened now. And then, with a different dread, does Joyce know she's here?

He met Buffy at the elevators, a broad hallway around the corner from executive reception that gave a certain privacy for his first glimpse of his daughter in more than twelve months. God, he was an ass. He couldn't believe he hadn't tried, hadn't called. But Buffy had seemed so disinterested that last visit, and Joyce hovered around her, protective and oppositional and ready to drag him into a pitched battle of blame. Poor excuses, he could admit it, but he'd been so busy, and his time alone had been so peaceful and so rare.

The girl who stepped from the brushed steel doors was different again than the daughter who had lived in their old house and who had visited his new one. She was thinner, paler and more self possessed, she stood straight and confident, with quick, wary eyes that took in everything. Buffy was seventeen, would turn eighteen in the middle of January, but he couldn't see much of the child in her, even less than the year before. She wasn't muffled anymore though, she had the same focused, alert consciousness she'd always had - even as a soft toddler on his arm with her straw colored curls and tiny sailor dresses Joyce used to put her in - but even more sharp and amplified than it had ever been. She wore a rose pink sweater with pearly buttons down the front and trim black trousers, and a sleek, high ponytail, like a little blonde Audrey Hepburn. Yet nothing about her presence was delicate, it was electric ad direct. Hank felt the small hairs rise on the back of his neck, as though his daughter was something uncanny approaching.

She looked like his Buffy, but one who'd travelled a greater distance to see him than those twelve months. She seemed a long way from the precocious and gregarious child who he used to take to ice shows, and who used to demand to wear her pink feather boa and sparkly dressup shoes to school. Those memories were very old, he realized, though perfectly clear and close to his heart. Joyce had taken over a lot of the kid shuttling duties when his workload got heavier. Does she blame me for all of it, he wondered, and then shook himself.

"Hello, Buffy," he said, walking forward to greet her. He wanted to hug her, to gather her up and squeeze like he used to, before, but she held herself taut and aloof so he decided he shouldn't. "What a wonderful surprise to see you here," he said instead.

"Hi, Dad," she said simply, with a faint warm smile. "Sorry for the no warning and everything, but it turns out I'm in town, so."

"Hey, it's no problem at all, I always have time for you, sweetie," he said and the mentally winced. He sounded like a dumb dad from a bad TV movie, and he could tell from the skeptical shift of his daughter's face that she knew it was patently untrue. "Are you in LA for long? Your room at the new house is always ready for you, Buffy."

"I'm already staying somewhere," she said, kindly but without regret, "Thanks though. I just thought, maybe we could catch up. Since I'm here."

"Of course, I'd like that very much."

Hank lead her through the wide, minimalist executive lobby with its perpetual reserved hush, around the corner to his own office suite. Ginny, his assistant, watched them go by with undisguised curiosity, and he noticed that Buffy studied her in return with icy speculation. He wondered what Joyce had told her, or maybe she'd heard more through closed doors than he'd realized. He wanted to tell Buffy that it wasn't her, not Ginny who was fantastic at keeping him on schedule but nothing more. That Ginny was married to her own wannabe artist, but even if she wasn't, Hank was through with those sordid mistakes. He didn't think he could say those things to his teenage child, no matter how shockingly adult her gaze had become.

"Do you want anything?" Hank asked instead, "coffee, tea, soda?"

"Um. Okay, if you're having something. Tea would be nice."

"Ginny, can you bring us a pot of genmaicha, please? And then you can take your lunch if you like."

"Sure thing, Mr. Summers."

Hank waved Buffy ahead of him into his office and shut the door behind them so no one would wander in looking to chat — mysteriously, the closed door never slowed down Ginny with her hands full of tray. In the seating area in front of the windows, there was a deep leather couch the color of honey that was long enough to seat most of his department heads. Buffy perched at the far end of it and watched him. It seemed he had earned distant speculation as well, and it stung to see her looking at him almost as a stranger, though he guessed he'd earned it over the last few years. He sat carefully, leaving the length of the coffee table between them.

"So this is the new office," she said, looking around, taking it in.

"Not so new anymore, but yes. What do you think, sweetheart? Pretty great, huh? I bet your mom told you all about Uncle Roland's interesting exit strategy… Do you remember him? He's the one who gave you that big Steiff elephant for your fifth birthday."

"Of course I remember Roland. He always used to bring those fancy chocolates when he came for dinner. And ask to see my latest drawing on the fridge, even when I was like, ten already," Buffy laughed and shook her head, "Mom didn't exactly get into it. She just said that you got to be the boss now, but that she felt sorry for Christine. Or, no, what she said was 'poor Christine, but maybe she'll be happier now without that manic-depressive controlling her life.'"

"That… sounds like Joyce, alright."

"So is she? Happier now?" asked Buffy, back to watching him closely, and he had to remind himself not to take it as a hint, or a jab about him and her mother.

"Christine? I don't know," he admitted, "She wasn't very interested in keeping in touch with me after it all wrapped up."

Ginny came in then, bearing the tray with a squat flameware teapot and two handleless cups, the green tea service, and a small bowl of varicolored rice crackers. Buffy glanced at him as Ginny set down the tea spread, and then relaxed her anxious posture, slightly, like she'd decided there wasn't anything incriminating about this assistant after all. He thanked Ginny and waved her off, reaching out to pour the tea himself.

"So, Buffy. How have you been? What brings you down to the city?" Hank asked. He was worried now that the initial surprise and joy of seeing his daughter had worn off. "Actually, Buffy, it's occurring to me that it's the middle of a Wednesday, and this is the second week in October… Shouldn't you be in school?"

Buffy gave a long, silent look to the cup cradled in her hands and then nodded slowly, not like an assent, he thought, but like she was making to a decision, or was simply lost in thought. Over the years, she had become so difficult for him to read. As a little girl she had been so open, she used to share her every feeling with the world, but sometime in onset of adolescence and high school and the secret society of teenaged girldom and all the rest, she'd outgrown that translucence. Maybe he wasn't the best father, probably he wasn't, but she sure didn't go out of her way to help him understand. And here she was in his office, when she should almost certainly be three hours to the north, sitting in class.

"Well, yes, Dad, theoretically I should be," she said carefully.

"Theoretically?"

"Wait, did mom not talk to you, like, at all this last summer?" asked Buffy, sounding surprised or concerned.

"No, I haven't heard from either of you since, I don't know. I guess it was your birthday. I'm sorry, sweetie, I didn't mean to fall so far out of touch…"

"No, that's not-" she made a dismissive face and then looked at a loss. "I thought sure mom would have called you," she said, confused, impatient. Hank felt his heart sink with dread, both at his ignorance and at the implication that something was going on that would warrant Joyce breaking their entrenched silence to warn him about.

"Oh god, how do I even explain. I guess just quit stalling and say it, right? From the top. Or as close to the top as we can deal with. Look. Things got bad last spring. I'd been seeing…. this guy, and he was so great for a while, but then he kind of. Went off the deep end. He got into a lot of trouble, and then some of the things he did…" a look passed over Buffy's face, inward looking and haunted, shaken. Then she composed herself and looked at him directly, like she was daring him to scold or comfort. "Anyway, it was bad," she said, "But I handled it. He went away. Only I didn't handle it quite quick enough, and some really lousy things happened, and the nasty little troll in charge of Sunnydale High decided he could blame me for them and he kicked me out. Plus, mom and I… let's just say that we disagreed about how I was handling the Angel situation and ultimatums were made. The truth is, I moved out."

"You moved out?" he exclaimed. He struggled to comprehend what she was saying, what absurd drama she was paraphrasing, and why she spoke about it with such careful and wilful composure, like she was letting him down gently. Like what she was saying was painful but not inappropriate and extreme beyond belief. She clutched her tea and watched him, looking tired and unsettlingly solemn but fully reasonable. No angry tears today, nor any hazy detachment from reality. Still, it was impossible, he didn't want to believe. "Buffy, you're only seventeen, you can't move out on your own!"

"Yeah and I was seventeen when mom said that if I walked out that night then I shouldn't come back at all, but she did. And don't tell me she was bluffing because she wasn't," she said, nearly accusatory, "I know that look. You , of all people, know that look."

"I don't understand, Buffy. You're saying Joyce kicked you out?" Hank was increasingly certain that Joyce had, as awful, as sickening as the idea was. Joyce could be so kind and so sweet and so infinitely patient, and yet the opposite was also true. When she was angry, when she had decided against you, she was cold and she was vicious, and nothing could make her listen. "Was this over the guy you were seeing? You wanted to go move in with him? I thought you said he's turned psychotic."

"No, I told you, Angel was dangerous but now he's gone. I never moved in with him. I never wanted to." Buffy hunched further over her tea, her posture small and braced as though against a prevailing wind. Her voice was clear and tight, though, not embarrassed or dissembling.

"Then what, Buffy? What the hell was going on that would make Joyce say something like that to you?" he found himself near shouting, helpless and distraught. Hank put his cup back on the tray and stood, pacing away and then coming back. The beautiful, light and peaceful office he cherished was now claustrophobic with tension. He imagined a cloud of blame overhead like an impending storm. His daughter watched him with wary eyes and a brittle calm. Shocking how brave and steady she was in spite of the gruelling tale she was unfolding.

"You think I provoked her, don't you," Buffy accused.

"Jesus... I don't think that, but I'm lost here... I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. You're right, I know better than anyone what Joyce is like when she decides everything you do is in the wrong, but I also know that things had to be in a pretty extreme place for her to react that way. I mean, you're our kid, Buffy, and you weren't in the room with the lawyers but you gotta know how hard she fought me for sole custody. How the hell could it get to that point?"

"I don't know, it just did, okay? It just kept getting worse with her. God, I know a lot of it is my fault, there was so much I didn't tell her. But you have to believe me, I didn't have a lot of choice about that either. It didn't exactly help that she'd absolutely decided I was a delinquent. There was nothing I could say that she'd believe. And that night I couldn't stick around and listen to another lecture. I had to go, or a lot of people would have gotten hurt."

"Because of your boyfriend?" asked Hank, already knowing that it was so. He found that he had accepted that the rest of it was also inevitably true, Joyce had kicked their daughter out of her house, and neither of them had seen fit to tell him about it until right then. "And there was no one else who could have stepped in? You couldn't have just called the cops on him?"

"My ex. My very, very ex, even back then. And no, there was no one else I could call. There never is," she said grimly, and here her composure fractured, her face pinched with sorrow, her eyes wide and wet. "I had to, okay? I need you to believe me, Daddy, I had a responsibility."

She looked up at him, he was still standing by the end of the sofa. The afternoon sun from his huge executive windows made her look golden, and so young. He was proud of her, he realized, for not backing down when there were other people to consider. He didn't understand, but he was proud. Hank was even proud, in a strange way, of her suffering and her endurance, of the fierce will of hers that he could sense, abrasive and unbending. Buffy was not weeping, not defiant, but her expression was open to him at last, pleading and earnest.

"Okay, okay, yes, I do believe you," Hank told her seriously, like a promise. "I feel like you're telling me less than half the story here, but I do believe you, Buffy."

There was a pause. Hank took calming breaths and resumed his seat. He felt like he'd run a marathon already. He'd been excited to hear Buffy was there to see him. He'd had the idea of a nice afternoon with her, show off his job a little, maybe indulge her shopping habit, pretend it was like old times. He'd forgotten to account for how his daughter seemed to travel in a torrent of disaster the last few years.

"But you said that was in May," Hank said, realizing, "You guys haven't worked things out? You're not back home?"

"No. Well, okay, so this part is way more my fault. I moved down here and I didn't tell anyone, which was way more reasonable than it sounds now, alright? Because at the time, some of the things Angel did, the cops kind of thought I might have done, even though I very much didn't do them. And the cops have figured that out by now, to be clear. But back then, anyone I told would have been kind of sort of aiding and abetting a fugitive, so I didn't tell them. And then, you know, the longer I didn't tell them, the more impossible it became."

"Jesus christ. Buffy…" horrible, seedy, chilling scenes flashed behind his eyes with his daughter as the unhappy star, and he told himself that she looked healthy and whole, that nothing nearly as bad as the worst case scenarios he feared could happened while she was on the run from the law. On the run from the law, oh holy god, what had his baby been swept up in? She said it was over, he reminded himself, whatever it had been. He sipped his tea and tried to find some peace of mind. "Is this ex of yours in prison now? Because if he's not, he sure outta be."

A strange and unreadable expression came over Buffy's face. "He is suffering for his crimes, yes," she said carefully. Hank was less reassured than he wanted to be.

"So you haven't talked to Joyce at all since then?" he asked, already suspecting the answer.

"I know I should have called her. I just couldn't," Buffy admitted, now with a reassuring ring of youthful petulance.

"Well, I can't tell you I think that's a good choice, kiddo. But I do know how intimidating your mother can be. And now I can see why you're shocked she didn't call me and let me know about any of this. Why is it you came to see me, Buffy? Are you sure you don't need someplace to stay?"

Buffy shook her head and sighed lightly. She finished her tea and set her cup aside. She looked more relaxed now, less like she was ready for fight or flight. This had been some kind of emotionally brutal trust exercise, he realized, whether Buffy had consciously meant it that way or not. It looked like he'd passed.

"I guess I came because I'm going back to Sunnydale soon. A friend came down and found me, and I realized that I have to go back. To try to make things right. I have friends, and responsibilities, stuff I can't abandon," Buffy explained, "But I don't know how that's gonna go. Especially with mom. She really, really didn't call?"

"I'm sorry, sweetie, she hasn't. I can't tell you how much I wish that wasn't the case."

"Right. Sorry. I should have called, too, at least given you the chance…" she sighed again and fiddled with the seam of the sofa cushion beside her knee. "I was too much of a mess when I got down here."

"And you couldn't be sure if I'd have your back, am I right?" Hank asked gently, sad and so full of remorse, knowing he deserved her lack of trust.

It was as close as they'd come to mentioning the ordeal after the gym at Hemery since it happened. It made him ill to think about it, even still, his daughter sobbing hysterically in a cheery, generic waiting room, the look of betrayal she'd leveled at them both when she'd realized, Joyce's clammy hand holding onto his arm so hard he'd had a bruise later. He hadn't seen Buffy incoherent with upset since she graduated preschool, and upset like that, like they were proposing to murder her, not ever. He'd thought they were getting her the help she needed. Words were thrown around like delusions, and mania, and emergency medication. They'd been so, so wrong, he wasn't sure he could ever truly make up for it.

"You're doing better with all of this than I gave you credit for," Buffy said, an oblique acknowledgement that his guess had been right.

"I want you to know that you to know that you can trust me, okay? I made mistakes, with you and with Joyce, but I'm still your dad and I'm still on your side," he said, so heartfelt that his eyes stung.

"I hope you mean that, Daddy, I really hope you do. Because like I said, I don't know how it's gonna go with Mom back in Sunnydale. I have to be there for school and… things but I don't know if moving back into that house is gonna work out for us."

"I understand why you're scared. Joyce has a way of, of getting locked into a battle of wills. She has control issues. It's why I backed off so far, every time got into it with her, things would just… spiral. Not that it's all her fault, though, Buffy. I did a lot that hurt her very badly. I have to wonder if she would still have been so tough on you if I hadn't made her so insecure."

"Maybe, but that doesn't make it okay," she protested.

"No, it doesn't. Right now I'm pretty damn mad at her, for a lot of things. But I want to be honest here, I don't think I'll be any help smoothing the way between you two. I'd probably just make her more confrontational."

"No, I know that much," said Buffy with a sad, wry smile. She turned to face him a little more, her face hopeful. "I guess I just wanted to be sure that one of you still had my side. That if I needed bailing out again- figuratively I mean, never, ever actually, I swear- that you'd be… here. For that."

"Of course, kiddo, of course I would be," he promised, he swore like an oath of loyalty, and then wondered what he could really do if she needed help again in a crisis like the one she had almost but not quite described. What had she been through, he wondered, what had she really been through that she couldn't tell him? But he would be her ally, if she would give him the chance, if he could figure out how.

"You know, it may not be as bad as you're thinking with your mom," he added, trying to buoy her, "She loves you so much, and know she must have missed you like crazy even if she was angry. I bet she was scared, too. Just, try not to make into a battle of who's more in charge. Appeasement is the name of the game. And know that you always have a room with me. But I bet you anything it won't come to that."

They only talked for a little while longer. Hank extracted from Buffy a promise to call and keep him updated, that she would leave messages with his secretary or with his home machine if necessary. He told her that he would find the time to drive up for a weekend when things settled a bit and he wouldn't be stepping on Joyce's toes too much. She should just let him know when was a good time. Even as he made these assurances, he wasn't sure if either of them would follow through, but he hoped. He hoped with an impelling hugeness of wishing that he would be better than that this time. That Buffy wasn't so deep into whatever it was that she was in that she could still reach out.

Buffy hugged him as she left. She was still so tiny and girlish in his arms, though her grip was shockingly firm, like when she was his little gymnastics and ballet and skating princess and expected him to lift her high in the air, unaware of the well trained strength of her little self. She had thanked him, and didn't tell him that she loved him, but Hank guessed that he heard it in her voice.

When he was alone in his office again, Hank wondered a lot of things. About Buffy and her troubles. About what had come over the woman he had married, who he couldn't love anymore and yet still did, sometimes, at least who she had been. He wondered again about the Buffy's delinquency, and the fire in the gym, and the fantastic story she had told, and the death-pale betrayed look of her as he'd driven her home from the hospital. She'd had to do it, or a lot of people would have been hurt, she'd said, just like she had said today about her ex, when the piercing, electric looks in her eyes had been even more focused and assured. He didn't think she was lying, and he was sure that she wasn't crazy. His skin pickled with a feeling of strangeness, and he wondered, without being able to fully articulate it even within the space of his skull, if what Buffy had said back then had really been a cry for attention after all. If the doctors were wrong, if it wasn't really something else.

Hank put on his jacket and left a note for Ginny to cancel the rest of his day. Suddenly he couldn't stand the over-curated atmosphere of his office. He needed a drink. He needed possibly a number of drinks. He wished, unexpectedly and profoundly, that his old confidant Roland wasn't a transatlantic phone call away - but then, even if he weren't, Hank knew that none of this was his to tell.

* * *

It was a long drive back up to Sunnydale, made worse by the congested friday traffic in the city. The small back seat of the Citroen was full of the stuff she hadn't wanted to leave behind at the apartment, the trunk full of Giles' own bags and the weapons and books he'd brought along - just in case, but unused in the end.

Buffy had collected more things than she'd realized over the last five and a half months, and she reasoned that as she'd earned the money that had paid for it she might as well take some of it back with her. She picked up a few boxes from the diner when she'd gotten her last week's pay and returned her uniform, and filled them with odds and ends. The clothes she'd had to buy to fill out her wardrobe, the single new pillow and a set of sheets, the cotton blanket she'd slept under, the bedspread printed like a russian shawl she'd found at the second hand shop that she'd strung up like a screen. In another were the non-perishable foodstuff from her cupboards so they wouldn't just get thrown away. She took the pretty red kettle, too, and the three delightfully ugly stoneware mugs that fit so nicely in her hands. She'd have her own place again someday, she reasoned, probably sooner rather than later if things kept going the way they had.

She hadn't been able to sleep the night before, wound aching-tight with anticipation. She'd used the time for packing and cleaning, trying to keep busy. As dawn came on she went for a long run to tire herself out enough that she wouldn't make herself and Giles both crazy on the road. By mid-morning, she'd already washed and redressed and taken her final glance around, and locked up, refusing to linger. When Giles arrived to pick her up, she was sitting with her few boxes in the lobby. He'd eyed her carefully, but hadn't commented on the obviously tired and fidgety state of her.

Buffy sat in the passenger seat and tried to bury herself in her next paperback, this one chosen almost at random during her last visit to the bookshop she'd made her frequent haunt. It turned out to be a poor and grim, but she stuck with it for the first hour because it was more effective than the scenery at blocking out the thought of what lay ahead. She gave up after a while though, closing the book with a soft noise of disgust and reached around to shove it in one of the boxes in the back seat.

"Badly written, I take it?" Giles asked drily.

"I honestly couldn't say," she said, picking up her water bottle to fiddle with instead, "Not one sentence sunk in. Shame, too. It'll probably be the last chance I have to read a recreational, non-assigned, non-demony book for a really long time."

She watched hillsides go by, the big signs listing off familiar, famous names. She'd always liked that she a Southern California girl, glad of growing up where wild Pacific and the desert and long spine of hills all met and shook hands in a dusty, glittering paradise, by the places listed off as the homes of movie stars and computer geniuses. The true and mangled Spanish names had always, when she was a child in history class in school, made her think of the conquistadors and of of bulky, placid tiled Missions, of the goldrush and of adventure. Later, of course, she'd learned better, taken in the lessons about how the Missionaries hadn't been so peaceful after all, how the hills caught fire in the summer, how landslides could come when it rained, how a great, angry faultline meant someday, probably to crack the state appart. And even later, that the mouth of hell lurked beneath a quaint college town on the tourisism corridor, waiting to do even more harm than the San Andreas.

All that doom and gloom was hard to believe, though, as the highway wound them northwards, past low slung cities and then out toward the coast, through a clear and breezy October day wisped with cirrus clouds. The Citroen didn't have air conditioning, and the cabin grew heated in the sun, despite the mild day. The leather seats were soft and deep, worn smooth and giving after its twenty-something years of life, smelling comfortingly dry and warm. Buffy found herself sinking into it, leaning lightly against the padded armrest on her door. She'd been awake and worrying for a long time already, and even her nerve-wracked endurance wasn't infinite. She found herself drifting in a half-doze, feeling the light on her close eyes, the faint motion of the road keeping her grounded. She didn't want to sleep, not really. There was a countdown running in the back of her head as the miles ticked off and Sunnydale grew nearer, she didn't want to approach it unawares - though what difference that would make she couldn't have said. It was nice to rest, though, just her and Giles and their things, rolling along in his funny car.

They could keep going, she realized. They could keep going up the highway all the way North, or until they hit Canada anyway because her passport was still in her mother's lock box. But they could, they had enough stuff and enough trust, and enough knowhow to get by. For a heart-pounding series of moments she pictured it, the long road, a Northwest she didn't really know except for Sam and Jonah's houseboat in Sleepless in Seattle , somewhere new and clean where no one knew either of them. Buffy glanced over at Giles from under half closed eyes, watching his thoughtful profile as he drove and thought about asking, or joking about asking. She knew he would say yes.

The idea evaporated in the next breath, never possible, never serious. The Hellmouth needed her. Willow and Xander needed her. Her mother would never forgive her if she passed without even stopping, and once she stopped she couldn't leave again. Her father finally almost trusted her again and she'd told him she was making things right. Giles would do what she asked, whatever she asked, no matter how impossible or stupid it was, and that meant she was even more duty bound to do right by him than anyone. All of that meant that Sunnydale was the place to be.

When they left the highway, Buffy rolled down her window, needing to feel the fresh air moving on her skin. Almost there, almost home. She was fidgety again, all lethargy gone. She crunched and crackled her disposable water bottle in her hands until Giles asked her tiredly to stop.

"Sorry," she said, "This is way, way intense, coming back here."

"You'll be home soon, now. Then at least it won't be looming up on you anymore," he said, and decisively took the turnoff for Sunnydale. "Or would you like to stop somewhere first, get something to eat and gather your thoughts? You didn't fool me into thinking you'd eaten breakfast, you know."

"No. Thanks but I just want to get there already."

They passed the Gallery as they went through town, but it was dark and the lot was empty. That just left the house, almost certainly. How many days had her mother left early or stayed at home in order to wait to hear from her? Guilt shivered through her, reminding her of repercussions everywhere. There hadn't been another choice, Buffy reminded herself, not with the threats over her head.

And if Joyce wasn't at the house, what then? But of course she was. The Jeep was in the drive when Giles pulled up in front, and under the deep shade of the porch, she could tell that the living room lights were on. Buffy undid her seatbelt and took up her duffle bag, and then eyed the boxes in the back seat. Juggling them into the house first thing did not seem like a comfortable idea, and neither did confronting her mother with Giles and the boxes in tow, for various and difficult reasons.

"Any chance I can leave that stuff for now?" Buffy asked, "Walking in waving all that… evidence under her nose would probably not be great for first contact festivities."

"That's fine, Buffy. Provided it doesn't ride around back there indefinitely, of course," said Giles. He gave her a small, nervous smile, looking unsure what to do with himself. "Would you like me to go with you, as, um, backup?"

"Do you honestly think that would be a good idea?" she asked, gently incredulous.

"Well, no, actually. Given past evidence," he said apologetically, "But I wanted to offer just in case."

Her mouth was dry and her palms were clammy, but she wasn't actually afraid of her mother. Not really, anway. Not even of a confrontation, which there wouldn't be, because her mother didn't like shouting matches or talking it all out, she liked skipping to the part where you paper over the cracks. It was the uncertainty getting to her, she guessed, and the atmosphere of Sunnydale closing back over her head. Giles was watching her with concern again, so she tried to give him a reassuring look of confidence.

That was going to be weird, too, she realized. She and Giles had hung out a lot in LA. Hung out like Watcher and Slayer and like real friends. Like she had been an honorary adult person or he had been an honorary young person, like a couple of displaced equals, not like Pretend Librarian and Pretend Student - how she often thought of their roles at school. They probably couldn't go on like that back here, not without raising some eyebrows or small-minded people thinking unfair things. She'd hang onto as much of it as she could though, Buffy had the sense that she would need her one unshakeable confidant in the months ahead. It still felt abruptly like a parting, and Buffy met his knowing gaze, silently acknowledging.

Impulsively, on a wide, upwelling wave of fondness and precipitous loss, she leaned across the seat divider and threw her arms around his shoulders. It was awkward, she'd misjudged the angle slightly, and Giles was still wearing his seatbelt, and she kind of sort of bumped his jaw with her forehead, but still she clung, fingertips scrabbling at his sweater. Giles held her back as securely as he could with the steering wheel and seat back hampering his reach, she didn't doubt for a moment that he meant it. Her eye stung as she pulled back, and she had to take calming breaths - his hands fell to her waist and he held her firm as she settled, like preparing for a lift, or a balance correction, keeping her steady. She nodded when she was ready and he let go.

"Thank you for coming to get me," she said, voice small and strained.

"Always, Buffy," he said with that shy little wince of a smile that meant that he was trying valiantly to avoid some kind of maudlin display.

Buffy took pity on him, tired of maudlin displays herself by now. She cleared her throat. She put on her game face. The sleepy, shaded street, the pleasant, square and gabled house, the important reunion within, all lay waiting for her.

"Okay. Well, I guess I'll see you later, then," she said.

She got out of the car.

* * *

Note: This was the end of the first 'stave' or 'book' in this story. The next 'book' settles us back into the Sunnydale High setting S3 events. It is already underway, and I'm guessing the next update will post in two weeks, give or take. It looks like there will be 4 'books' in total, you'll be able to keep track by the chapter title groupings. On AO3 i'm posting these works as a series, but due to the ffnet format, that isn't possible. feel free to head over that way if you find that format easier!


End file.
